Land of Confusion

Where's the Old Spice of Women's Marketing

2010-07-25T11:29:00.001-07:00

My friend Colin Gorman, marketing genius at BBH, made a subtle but important insight to me over email. When you look at the most recent commercial viral campaigns they are dominated by mens brands.

Of course the talk of the day is about the Old Spice guy. Funny, silly commercial. But they also targeted the most active and linked users in their network and directly responded to them. In videos with the star. They produced 70+ videos in 2 days addressing individuals, including Alyssa Milano who had dared the Old Spice man to donate money to Gulf Disaster relief. It's so popular, a VC actually got into a towel to pitch to a room of entrepreneurs. This is a pic of the video address to the entrepreneurs:

The whole Old Spice campaign is cheeky, biting, a little bit random with a hint of surprise.

Another one I really loved was the Day and Night video from Axe body spray. They call it their Anthem. It's a really fun video that captures a day in the life of a college-aged party maniac. It really captured a lifestyle that the movie Go attempted and just missed. It's hilarious. And it's cheeky, fun, and a bit random with a lot of surprise.

I could keep going down the list with other companies like TAG, but the point is more that these campaigns are very much targeted at a male audience, and that in targeting the male audience, they seem to have found a recipe that's also viral. I wonder if there are equivalents in the female category. I don't see them, but that may be because I am not in the target demographic (although I'll bet many women know about the Old Spice and Axe campaigns). The kitten meme doesn't count.

I know there was the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. But that was much more serious and clung to an issue rather than a lifestyle. Is there something out there I am missing?

If not, I think there is an opportunity to target the college age and early woman audience with something that's cheeky, fun and surprising. There are women who go out, club, dance, get drunk, party etc. but we almost never see that scene as a marketing ploy. Where is the "Girls Night Out" video that captures the lifestyle of this demographic? We've all seen those parties in motion, we have heard the screams, seen the ploys, played the games and even held some hair. Now admittedly, living in NYC I may be a little biased. It didn't seem like there are many opportunities in Davenport, Iowa so maybe the national appeal of the market segment is less than I perceive it to be. Then again, this is a pic of my girlfriend at a party from Iowa State.

I know. I am so proud!

So who's going to be the brand that breaks away from the traditional female marketers. I think this is a large niche that has yet to be filled. Or maybe, I am just terribly uninformed. What do you think?

BTW, it was Colin's birthday this weekend. Happy birthday!

A Quick Response to Some Dumb Analysis on Apple

2010-05-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Ok, I admit it. No I proclaim it. I love Apple products. Tell me you enjoy putting in a calendar entry. I do on my iPhone. And I love my Mac OS and yes I hate using your PC. But that's not to say that Apple is above reproach. The search warrant and seizing of property was more than a bit much. It was a douche move. Apple is leveraging it's dominance in the ecosystem to eek out considerable revenues. It's pushing out 3rd parties from intermediating themselves (Flash dev tools as an example), although I generally agree with controlling the quality of your distribution channel. It's a monopolistic threat and I worry that they may push too far. But so far, the products are great, and one of the key reasons is control. I think early markets should be controlled before they are opened up. Starting off as the wild, wild west can be problematic. But I digress.

My friend, Janet, sent me this article because I am an Apple enthusiast. She thought of me.

http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=10031

Top 10 Apple marketing mistakes, but man this guy is way off. Apple surely made mistakes. Pricing low in an emerging market in early PC days was one. But it is also why even though Apple has well under 10% market share, it has 80% margin share. Hard to argue on that one. But overall, his biggest analytical mistakes are in this writer's top 5.

#5 Sleeping With Microsoft - This guy is dead wrong. I would not have a mac if I could not run Word and Excel. Period. A laptop needs to meet a generalist purpose. A lot of startups I know run on Apple. None would without Office. Google Apps is only beginning to provide an alternative.

#4 Treating Journalists Like Cockroaches - Dead wrong again. Yes there is some journalist bitching, mostly from the recent search warrant. Before that, it was journalists bitching, but not in the consumer eye which matters. Overall, Apple has a mystery that makes it much more interesting and widely talked about than competitors. Did you know Microsoft is about to release a new mobile phone? Nope. Because no one cares. Apple's new iPhone in June? Bet you know the whole story. Mystery, exclusivity add to the brand value. I'm not supporting the search warrant, that was a douche move. But secrecy breeds intrigue. Even journalists who get the good scoop. Just ask Gizmodo.

#3 Pretending Their the Underdog - Man this guy is getting dumber with each of these. Mac's share in the PC market is under 10%. Ummm ... that's underdog in the PC business. Comparing it's overall valuation that's based on iPod and iPhone business is stupid. It's like saying Microsoft is pissed because it's marketing itself as #20 keyboard manufacturer even though it has a multi-billion dollar market cap. Different business. Apple has to challenge the "Why status quo?" Check out the market share trend since these commercials launched. Check out the improvement in brand identity. Check out customer loyalty. I'm Apple. I'm different than the mainstream people who just take what they're given.

#2 Censoring the iPhone - What you don't get is that there is a value at controlling the quality and identity of your marketplace. If iPhones and iPads are kid friendly, which device is going to be a kid's first device (hint: they will use the parent's credit card). Gaming and education will be huge on these platforms. The porn stand limits short term revenue in favor of long term penetration. Yes, I said penetration when referring to porn.

#1 AT&T Exclusivity Agreement - Ok. That's it. This guy just reached my idiot of the week status. Apple just turned the entire mobile industry eco-system upside down. Walled gardens. Control of deck. Using the mobile carrier infrastructure. If Apple didn't grant exclusivity, they would have no grounds to make demands. Their amazing product is the sole reason for AT&T's increase in market share (look at the stats). They used their superior product to negotiate a superior business model that now every carrier has to adopt to play with the most popular consumer device. They couldn't have done this without exclusivity. What's that? A billion apps sold? An iPad platform for next generation tablets where they control media and software distribution? Treating the carriers like a pipe. Apple got everything for a couple years of exclusivity. In one market.

There are many reasons to be wary of Apple flexing it's muscles and stifling innovation. Right now though, they are the most innovative company in mobile.

Is Bravo an Ad Network on FourSquare?

2010-04-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

I just began to understand the value of FourSquare's strategy to partner with content providers. I thought I understood partners like Zagat recommending better restaurants or to dos, but I recently checked in to Merc bar and was told by Bravo to go to Paul Smith. By choosing to "follow" them to get a badge, I essentially opted in to them pushing me content.

If you think about this closely, this is essentially a proactive magazine, pushing me content when it's most easily actionable i.e. when I'm nearby. Of course the content itself is a form of advertising. Go here, buy this.

So another way to think about this is me opting-in to local ad networks, based on brand affinity (ex. Bravo, Zagat, WSJ, etc.).

I opted-in because I wanted a badge and I wanted to experiment, but over the long term this strategy can only be successful if I care about the badge that much (limited once you get the badge), if the content provider negotiates better deals (couponing as advertising) or the info is insightful and wanted (content as advertising).

As banner ads continue to die as we get better at ignoring them (just like tv commercials) advertising will continue to be integrated into service and content (just like TV). FourSquare's content strategy is an interesting development that allows them to plug in content providers or in other words ad networks. They need to be smart about controlling the marketplace, but it's a brilliant idea.

Facebook Could Become the iTunes of the Internet

2010-04-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

Note: I recognize that iTunes really is an Internet application already, so saying Facebook Could Become the iTunes of the Internet is like saying Justin Timberlake Could Become the White Michael Jackson. But alas …

I continue to be bullish about Apple in general. They make the best computers. The best media players. And they have the best media distribution platform – and if you follow Fred Wilson, you know that software is media too. Take a look at the AppStore. The success of iTunes when everything else failed miserably was based on a couple key factors:

1) Apple had the best media player and leveraged it – It’s amazing what a simple track wheel can do. Basic file interface and playlisting, easy to navigate. Drop dead simple. That’s what it took to win a billion dollar industry. A trackwheel.

2) iTunes was simple and just worked – I got my first MP3 player from my roommate Al. Getting songs on and off of it was a chore. The interface was flashy and choppy at points. Features were hard to use. iTunes you could just install and go. And provided the music you needed.

3) Micropayments were made easy – I think it’s kind of silly that Amazon “patented” one click check out, because Apple is even better at it. You put your credit card in once, and then any time you make a purchase, all you need to is put in a password. Easy. People will buy at $0.99 a song if it takes less than 15 seconds but won’t buy at $0.49 a song if it takes 1-2 minutes. They optimized on the right dimension – time. And because they roll up all transactions minimizing the fixed costs of credit card processing, they optimize on cost as well.

4) Apple worked with the media companies at desperate times – Yes Apple implemented DRM when no one else would, and that was more of a perceived chore than an actual one for the consumer. But in the end, that was what kept Apple in the game. And by leveraging the desperation of the moment (and their iPod install base), Apple struck a good deal with the media companies. A minor inconvenience for the power of consolidation.

Now the iTunes model to micropayments can apply to all kinds of digital media including news, magazines, stock research, blogs and almost anything. So now let’s shift gears to Facebook, which is in a tremendous position to become the iTunes of the Internet. The parallels are interesting:

1) Facebook is the Biggest Internet Application and Social Network – Already being there for now 500 million people is a HUGE advantage. No one else can really compete there. By integrating payments into Facebook apps like Farmville (60M players) they can overnight build an eWallet install base. With a little creativity, you could increase penetration well beyond that.

2) Facebook is Simple and Works – Facebook’s differentiation from MySpace was that it was simple, not cluttered and that the activity feed brought you what you really wanted – what your friends were up to. It was surprisingly useful and provided what you wanted before you realized how much you needed it. Now 250 million people check it every day.

3) Micropayments Made Easy – I haven’t seen Facebook’s payment interface, but it will be simple. They have a growing history of embedding their technologies into outside web sites. And their applications have experimented with credits already, so they have lots of sample implementations to reference. Plus, with tons of payment applications for person-to-person gifting and gift cards, group payments and social gaming, weaving in payments to the social fabric makes sense. But the success depends on the chances of a collision: that the person you are interacting with is on the same network. Facebook is the natural choice.

4) Facebook Will Work with the Leading Media Companies in Desperate Times – Ok, so this hasn’t exactly happened yet but all the pieces are in place. Media companies like NY Times, Meredith, Hearst and more are scrambling. They continue losing money, audience and differentiation – just like the Record Labels were. They are trying to create subscription based services and micropayment access, but they are unlikely to succeed. If they could plug in a simpler payment service with one click payments, they sure will have a hell of better time of it. They may lose the 5-10% margin in payment processing, but they will probably get 50+% increased conversion.

Now there is one thing I didn’t mention in the analysis that could be the X factor of success. Apple has much better brand standing than Facebook. Facebook’s Beacon program was an unfortunate misstep from which they will not easily recover. Customer trust is built over a lifetime and lost in an instant.

So Facebook needs to tread lightly. Start by integrating payments into its applications like Farmville. Partner or create some basic apps that further increase penetration (event payments, gifting, etc.). Then offer a payment API like Google Checkout to a few big media companies and then you are off to the races.

It wouldn’t take that long, but it would transform the Internet. Micropayments everywhere … Facebook is the iTunes of the Internet.

Now of course no one is going to just give up the largest payment processing opportunity on the planet. PayPal is no slouch at 30M monthly uniques. Amazon Checkout has had limited penetration beyond it’s walls, but there are a few noteworthy customers like Meetup. Google Checkout is a good small vendor solution, but has had little penetration among the big boys. And with the media hating Google right now, they seem unlikely bedfellows. Then of course there is Apple, with iTunes owning paid media distribution right now. If the iPad sells 5M units this year, that’s significant traction. But hardware purchase is a big obstacle to customer adoption. So advantage Facebook.

It’s all very early … but that makes it all very exciting too.

2010 - The Year of Magical iPad Thinking

2010-04-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

So this week I sold some Apple stock, but I think that may have been a mistake. I am so bullish on the much maligned iPad. Here’s why. I was at an entrepreneur round table reviewing an educational book company that was all electronic. You could replace the names of the characters and it would read or let you read the story to your kids. You could touch words and it would pronounce them for you. Not a very hard app, but great for kids.

How would you deliver that experience? On a kindle? Nope. Black and white is boring. On a LeapFrog, too hard to read and interact. The iPad is your best bet. Now if they added more interaction like choose your own adventure that would be even cooler (as I pointed out). Imagine a world you can explore, full of stories, interactive characters all in a learning environment. Would you really put it on a netbook? Probably not. Where are developers flocking? The iPad. Where will you have a rich library of these apps? The iPad.

Think of where else you would want an iPad in an educational environment. A while ago I wrote about FoldIt models.

Here is the YouTube embed:

On an iPad, this is a much cooler interface to understand organic chemistry. Anatomy: imagine exploring a 3D model of the body with your hands vs. a text book. iPad. Physics: demonstrations where you can change the variables and create interactive problem sets. Geometry: exploring shapes, symmetries, angular relationships. What about music and composing? The iPad already has some wicked DJ apps. Now let’s focus on music learning. Drawing and sketching?

But beyond that, let’s look at some of the more traditional, not so visual subject. I always hated history. Sure the stories were good, and I was ok at memorizing dates. But I was never good at synthesizing the whole thing together. Was the assassination of Archduke Fedinand a response to Russian involvement or did it trigger it? Imagine exploring history like a mind map with timeline interaction. See the events, drill down, see what’s next. Zoom out. See a related timeline of English involvement. What was happening in America at the time. When you can quickly navigate data with your hands, you create whole new ways to organize, present and interact with data of all kinds.

The iPad is magical – yes I said magical. Multi-touch interaction, a rich and large screen and a small footprint is revolutionary. Yes, it’s a big iPod Touch. But it’s the best platform by far for so many interesting apps. At the very least, it will be the leading portable gaming device within a year, which is a huge market in and of itself. The excitement given the wealth of possibilities is deserved. No one else in the market can pull this off. That's market leadership.

I think I may go back in. AAPL it up people!

Facebook Is the New Internet

2010-04-22T13:04:00.001-07:00

First off, I am borrowing a little from Mark Cuban on this, but I have been thinking about Facebook's latest moves and his article sparked my writing. It's an interesting time right now for Facebook as they release new functionality to extend its reach into every web page and service. Soon, everything we do on the net can be easily shared, incorporated into Facebook. Imagine a world where the NYTimes reports which articles your friends are reading and let's you easily spark discussions on the topic, just for you. Music playlists that are easily shared and commented on? What Facebook is doing is adding social connectivity to all our online activity, which is becoming most of our activity. And in doing so, it is plugging into our core existential social needs. Technology, which often is seen as taking us away from a social context, will now be bringing us back in and creating more meaning. And no one else can remotely achieve this. Facebook is the platform (which is also why I disagree with Mark Cuban on Facebook needing a mobile OS, they can just deeply integrate into the contact list because that's who owns our social connectivity. You can't launch a product without that).

And if Facebook defines our social connectivity, who are friends are to us, it inversely defines who we are to our friends. Why should I only be tagged on Facebook in photos or notes? What if this blog is tagged (besides me posting it to my activity feed) or a research article I write or a mention of me in huge story in the NY Times (see you this summer)? Check out Taggable, which does exactly that. Now the whole electronic universe can be captured on my Facebook profile and the work crowdsourced by friends. One day, it might be automated based on context and matching algorithms (this Trevor Sumner instead of this one).

Facebook encompasses so much. It's how we find out what's going on, what our friends are reading and recommending. As Mark Cuban points out, how often do you use Google anymore to find reading material ... If every service becomes social, is there a difference between the social web and the web itself?

Next up: Facebook is the new App Store.

Loyalty and the Emotional Side of Customer Retention

2010-03-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

I just finished SmartMobs (a recommended read) and came across a wonderful little anecdote. In Tokyo, one of the busiest intersections is Shibuya Crossing, where there is a bronze monument to a dog named Hachiko. Hachiko followed his owner, Professor Eisaboru Ueno, every day to the subway station and awaited there again that evening for his return. Professor Eisaboru died in 1925 and never made it back, yet Hachiko faithfully waited for him there every evening until 1934. Nine years, or sixty-three in dog years. It’s a touching story about loyalty.

And while the story pulls on my emotional heartstrings, it also leaves me in wonder. What made Hachiko come back every day for so long, hoping for a different result than the previous day? Is that just foolish? What made Hachiko so loyal in the first place?

On the web, I would argue that few things are more valuable than loyalty. With the breadth of services offered out there, you can buy books from someone else than Amazon, shoes from somewhere else than Zappos, movies from other services than Netflix. Often, it makes sense.

But the services that matter bring users back consistently and often without competitive consideration because of brand loyalty. And that’s what builds lasting value. It’s easy to buy traffic, just a click of the mouse. It’s really hard to build a service that people care about. If I were valuing a web company, the first thing I would ask for is repeat visits (visits per user per month, member retention/attrition, etc.).

So what builds lasting loyalty? There is utility and feel, the intellectual and emotional.

Apple has it through products that feel better. I don’t know if the roll wheel calendar on my iPhone is more efficient, but it’s more of a pleasure to use. I don’t think that the magnetic power cord in my Powerbook actually functions much better than a plug in, but the moment I connected them and the power chord literally jumped into the socket, I knew I was an Apple user for life.

FourSquare is another app that feels good. Its point system gives me that Pavlovian feedback, that slight burst of serotonin that makes me keep checking in. Intellectually I know it provides me no value. At the same time, I checked out Lewis Goldberg’s badge page and was actually kind of sad he had more than me. What do I really care about badges?

Now Apple provides me real utility. I am writing this on my Macbook Pro right now. FourSquare’s utility not so much, and I feel its hold waning on me. The gaming aspects have grown a bit old. I want more badges. New things unlocked. Feel can get stale. But if you mix positive feel with utility, maybe not even differentiated utility, then you get long-lasting loyalty. With every thing I do that’s helpful, I see it, more I feel it as a little bit more. A reinforcement of that initial joy, that satisfaction of a good product and of making a good choice. And that momentum gets a customer coming back for life.

Will I be using Apple products in 9 years? Who knows? But my stock portfolio is making a big bet for now that I will be.

Unique Problems With Uniques

2010-02-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

Uniques are what make the world go around, at least the Internet world. Advertisers care about their reach, the numbers of unique users they get in front of on a campaign. 1 million is the magic number and all of a sudden getting advertisers becomes much, much easier.

Uniques are so important that marketers like me spend money generating cheap traffic to inflate uniques even at a loss. It's a sizable percentage of traffic if you do it right, enough to inflate the numbers without killing your click through rates and bounce rate (the rate people leave the website after the first page view).

It's all about uniques. How are you compared to your competition? Check the uniques on compete.com. How's the board think you are doing? Just show progress on uniques. But as someone who looks at web metrics and models businesses, unique growth and future prospects of most business have much more to do with member retention (churn, repeat usage), viral coefficients and cost of customer acquisition and value. With positive key performance indicators (KPI) along these lines and you know you have a business that has long term value.

Sometimes that means you make prioritization decisions in development to things that drive uniques even at the cost of longer term value. The reality is that for $500, I can drive 50,000 visitors. $5,000 then 500,000. Not much money to get you halfway to that 1 million unique magic number.

But a new report and analysis say that the whole industry could be overestimating our unique count by a factor of 2 or 3. That's just crazy. If that were accurate it could send shockwaves throughout the industry. Or not.

If the number changes, does it change the performance of existing campaigns? We can still measure ROI. It won't change tomorrow. It just means we are twice as effective at marketing to half the number of people we thought. Or will the new numbers scare off holistic marketers who compare the reach of traditional campaigns? If this plays out, it could be a very interesting year.

Facebook Takes Over My iPhone

2010-02-05T14:58:00.000-08:00

Not surprisingly, Facebook has taken over my iPhone. Not the apps, but the phone itself, and it's about time. Facebook is where we are social. It's where our friends are. It's a contact list that updates itself. It fills out profile information with substantive info. So as the dynamic system of record of my social contacts, why hasn't it merged with my traditional contact list before?

Well, not all my contacts are on Facebook, so the approach they took is simple, just Facebook enhance the contacts they recognize. Now Facebook is in my iPhone contact list and can add all that data when I pull up their contact info. I now know not to suggest steak for dinner because I see from your status you had a ribeye at lunch. Combine that with FourSquare data and I might know roughly where you are. Give me Google Lattitude Access and I will know exactly where you are.

The point is that there are so many services that provide info about your friends and what they have done. Facebook is the defacto standard. By extending their reach into my contact list, they strengthen that position and make it easier for all of the smaller apps to get to the contact list, just integrate into Facebook you see.

It's a major move that hasn't received enough attention in my humble opinion. Now of course, Facebook is abusing this permission and sending me a constant stream of notifications that I am going to turn off. But they just staked out some significant territory and I am better for it (barring some serious privacy concerns, of course).

Obama Needs Your Help

2010-01-29T15:57:00.000-08:00

So my last post was pretty funny, mostly for the ads that popped up.

Obama needs my help. Donate now to get healthcare reform passed.

Obama, here's a little hint. I donate twice a month to help you get helpful policies passed. It's in my paycheck and it's over 30% of everything I make. I hope that's friggin enough!

And this is the core problem. My vote no longer determines what policies are going to be passed because of the people I elect. Instead, my vote decides who will later collect my money when I "vote" for which policies I care about by sending in more money.

Democracy and capitalism are naturally at odds. Democracy is one man, one vote where in capitalism, money is power. Now we have this weird hybrid and we're voting for who gets the money that determines policy. It's all just a sham then that comes down to money.

Strange, sad and makes you apathetic, especially when even the supreme court isn't there to protect democracy. Who's left?

The Role of Government in a Short Term Nation

2010-01-29T15:49:00.000-08:00

I thought Obama's State of the Union was decent. He's a good orator. It's nice to know the economy is back on the table since the stock market tanked (as I predicted) and joblessness keeps getting worse. But to a certain extent, I think we all went into it wanting to be inspired but in acceptance that even inspirational words would fall flat on apathetic ears. It's hard to watch these children that we call Congressman and Senators battle for turf like it's a late night game of Settlers of Catan. Seems like there is more at stake. Yes people are dying. Yes people are losing their homes. Yes people are losing their jobs. And that's just healthcare.

The Republican talking points after the speech were somewhat predictable, running off the familiar playbook. But it seemed Obama's preemptive attempts to mitigate their attack script on deficit spending, taxes and the like dampened the blow. Gov. McDonnel kept talking about the role of government with his smug grin.

Now as a libertarian, I generally agree. Get the hell out of my life. But the world has gotten so big and so complex, there are literally millions of ways you are being screwed right now. I was talking with CJ Kettler this afternoon, who serves on a board of a charity aimed at protecting children from harmful chemicals. She is about to petition for reform of an organization that formed in 1970 to ban hazardous substances in New York. In 30 years, they have banned 4 of them. Must be a nice job to have. I can name 4 substances that should be banned right now - diet coke, twinkies, Polly-O string cheese and fat free chocolate. Not that fat free chocolate is bad for you, but come on now!

I tend to like Bill Maher, and I remember on one of his shows he went off on a rant (paraphrasing):

"Why can't we be honest with ourselves in this country? We look around and see increased rates of disease and try to point the finger at a cause, but we all know the truth. America causes cancer. We pollute our air. We pollute our waters. We inject our livestock with hormones, drugs and genetically engineer our crops to withstand shipping and be nutrient-less. We eat and drink chemically engineered products like high fructose corn syrup. And then we are so naive as to say, 'I wonder why we have higher cancer rates than Chernobyl.'"

I agree. It's like what my roommate Brett said last week. "I can't drink diet soda. It tastes like cancer and makes my teeth tingle until I shiver." Ok, the shivering is a bit much, but from the moment I taste diet soda, I knew it was very wrong.

You can agree or disagree with aspartame if you wish, but the reality is that all these companies are incentivized for short term profits. They will try to get away with anything. Most don't care about your long term health, and the 'anything for a buck' attitude means that they will hide any subtle, hidden or long term negative effect for the greater good of the near term balance sheet.

But having a smart government to enforce those laws is difficult in a land of the uneducated. The temptations to reduce meaningful debate into trivial one liners of effective marketing is too great. The desire to do whatever it takes to get re-elected in the short term IS more important than the long term good of our nation. Honor and integrity are gone. You almost don't even remember what they looked like.

Where did the integrity go? It used to be that you could trust journalists. Now you have major "News" "anchors" make up stories about concentration camps after Katrina and no one goes into an outrage. Where's the intellectual honesty? Who are the protectors of truth any more? The short term profits for entertainment news outweighs the long term harm of a misled public. Maybe we should trust the BBC who have less of a vested interest?

We can't take the time to read the fine print of a credit card or loan and how they will jack rates to 30% at the first opportunity. For a major financial decision that could bankrupt you it's probably worth the time. Then again, it's not like I read every license agreement in a software update either. I sign legally binding agreements I don't read all the time. The need for instant gratification outweighs the considerations of long term benefit. And of course we know that we are being misled by all these parties. Yet we can't even legislate basic protections against financial institutions from clearly deceptive and malicious practices. We've come to accept it because the short term lazy acceptance is easier than the longer term fight to reform.

That's because we are a short term nation. A short attention span nation. A short bus nation, if you ask me. And in a world where truth is undervalued, underrepresented and underground, what is the role of government? I would like to say that the role of government is to help represent the truth, but the government can't have that responsibility or you're back to 1984. Some transparency would be a nice start.

We no longer have vision. We no longer have long term goals. What should America be in 2020 or 2050? What is our generation's moon landing? What is our great emotional, intellectual or moral revolution? The role of government should first be to define who we are, what we stand for. It's been lost in the rhetoric and I don't even know the answer to the question any more, if I ever did.

I wish I could present better answers. I wish I could say, "aha, here is the solution." All I can say right now is that listening to the current political conversation makes my teeth tingle until I shiver.

Marketing's Dueling Duality About Trust

2010-01-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Moved on from Cialdini's book on Influence and am now reading Seth Godin's Permission Marketing, which is a must read for everyone in marketing. There was an interesting point of overlap: Americas sensual overload on ads. Godin does a nice job explaining how this came about from the emergence of mass media and the rise and diminishing ROI of "interruption marketing."

What was interesting is that it is clear that modern society is overloaded with assaults of information. Cialdini argues that what sets us apart from animals is the ability to make order of all the info coming at us. But with such an overload, we are particularly susceptible to techniques that take advantage of our instinctual responses. We've taken order and created chaos. We took reason and created an environment where there is no time to reason. We've turned ourselves into animals.

Godin puts aside mass media and focuses on being different and learning to earn the trust of a few power users while Cialdini teaches ways to leverage instinctual response to get that initial trust (Godin relents that such sizzle and tricks are still necessary to spark initial interest).

Together they provide an interesting framework to capture and extend the attention and loyalty of customers.

However, it's interesting to note that preying on customer instincts conceptually undermines trust, but when done right is more of a sleight of hand. So being a great marketer means being both a trickster and a trusted advisor. A magician and a mentor. Interesting mix...

Buying Healthcare vs. Buying Health Insurance

2010-01-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

Saw an interesting poster in a subway station as I was on a train. It whizzed by so I didn't see the name of the brand. But what it said was that for $79.99 per month you could purchase healthcare with unlimited doctor visits, coverage of standard procedures (Gyn, electro cardiograms, colonoscopy, etc.) and discounts on prescriptions, and no copay.

But was interesting to me is that it said: "This is not INSURANCE." And that somehow struck me. When we think about healthcare as insurance, we naturally think about reacting to an incident, not preventative maintenance. We think about fault and liability, not compassion and treatment. We think it as something that is optional, a hedge, not something people have a right to. We think about it as a money matter, not a life matter with all the pain, profound limitation and fundamental fear associated with it.

Framing the conversation is key. The words we use have both subtle and overt consequences to the ideas we are thinking about, like renaming the estate tax the "death tax."

Take a step back. What we are really purchasing is healthcare, not insurance. How does that affect the way you think the industry should work?

Real Time Ad Optimization: Data, Speed and Optimization

2010-01-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting trend forming in online advertising. Right now you can purchase ads from ad exchanges by bidding on them. But what is that banner ad really worth? Depends on the site, the page, the person, the time and lots of other factors. People have been optimizing on some of the static stuff and basic behavioral and contextual information too, i.e. where you've been and what that means to you (that's right Mr. Porny).

But what if you knew everything about the user and the placement before placing your bid. You could optimize your bidding strategy. Impossible? Well, we are getting there. But it's a fascinating problem. How do you get all that info, process it, and come up with a bid in real time? How do you get so specific that you take advantage of all information but not so specific that your target is too narrow? The more narrow your focus, the smaller net you cast. How do you deliver the exact right ad for a million impressions a second? Tough stuff.

So what really matters? Is there some secret sauce? Well people are playing around right now with all kinds of info. Media 6 Degrees uses demographic info mixed with who your Facebook friends are (and you thought that was private right?). eBay calculates your propensity to buy based on previous site visits and other factors. But it could be anything and everything. You might be amazed what every ad network knows about you and what if that information was shared to vendors? There's going to be a lot of interesting development in understanding what makes the "right customer" ready for that exact ad, and it will be decided in milliseconds.

And if your net is too small looking for that exact red fish with blue gills, 1 ft long in the medittreanean, you'll probably miss out. With all that data, you'll now be able to realize that there is another correlation that really matters and allows you to extend your net. Maybe it's red fish with a spiny dorsal fin. There is going to be a lot of interesting work going out there on figuring out what really matters, and finally there will be the massive amount of data and computing power needed to do it with.

So what does this all mean? It means ads you'll want to click on. Ads that provide you value and enrich your experience even. It also means less ads, since each ad will therefore be worth more. It will be an approach that is used on the Internet, your mobile device and TV (which will be the Internet essentially anyway). It will be everywhere where you can be tracked.

Be prepared for a more personalized Internet. And probably a massive privacy scandal on the Internet like we haven't seen before. 2010 is going to be an interesting year.

Truth and Consideration: When Homophily is Murder

2009-12-31T10:15:00.000-08:00

We were talking about race and different approaches that people take to resolving century old prejudices with modern notions of equality. She argued that people in Austin refuse to discuss race but claiming not to see it as a factor, which simply prolongs predispositions. And if you have been to Texas, even Austin, you know that racism, sexism and homophobia are pretty overt. Erika argued that the key is to recognize and discuss difference and celebrate those differences.

I wrote a blog a while ago on some notable differences between African Americans, their African counterparts and some discussions of evolutionary psychology, which of course is a very tricky subject given that evolutionary psychology has been used to justify racist policy in the past. My brother, Eric, argued that to even to discuss such things is to validate that difference and that was a danger. The mere coverage of it, perpetuated the perception of difference.

To me, the overriding principle in such tricky situations is truth. Intellectual honesty and curiosity is key and that to always consider every way the article can be taken, especially those who are not as intellectually honest, is a poor principle to follow. It subverts the greater good, the pursuit of knowledge.

Well, I struggled with this some more this morning. I am reading an interesting book on my Kindle, called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. One of the chapters is the effect of homophily on decision-making, how people we associate as similar to us can affect our decision making. Now this bears itself throughout history in some well-documented cases. The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel by Goethe in which the main character commits suicide, prompted hundreds of suicides throughout Europe. Then there is the behavior of people in emergency situations are much more likely to act if there aren’t other people around who are also wondering whether to act or not. It’s group paralysis as we look for social cues on whether to act.

But this is documented in other, absolutely bizarre ways. For example, after a well-publicized heavyweight bout, there is an increase in the homicide rate. Violence on TV, violence in life … makes sense. But what’s fascinating is that if it’s a multi-racial fight, if the African American fighter loses, there is an increase in African American homicide rates, and if the Caucasion loses, an increase in fatalities among Caucasions. So overt violence maybe makes sense, even with the strength of association of race. Maybe we can trigger a natural violent instinct. But is there more here?

This one truly baffles me. After a well publicized suicide, the rates of car accidents and plane crashes in the area goes up. Could such a communicated case, similar to Werther, trigger sub-conscious mimicry? And mimicry in the face of our primal nature to survive? That’s pretty amazing. So if life or death is in the hands of journalists who report on a suicide, should they bury it? Should they be concerned about the potential effects? Should we report on the depravity of the human condition, if it encourages repetition?

Seems like a pretty tricky line that extended could be used for justification of Orwellian policy. That’s why I like the simplicity of honesty, not that's it's always simple. But I guess this answers the age-old adage. “If all your friends jumped off of bridge, would you?” You would. Just hope that it doesn’t end up on the news.

Fight for Control of Your Internet Experience

2009-12-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting thing going on that I predicted a while back. There's a fight for who gets to present your Internet to you and who gets the ad impression. You probably have seen glimpses of it.

For example, you probably have noticed that sometimes when you click on Facebook there is a little toolbar at the top that says that you were directed to the page from FB from a certain person. They were playing around with it a couple months back. They were invading sites outside of the Facebook domain. Just a couple pixels at the top, but it is invasion, which is why they probably removed it recently. Imagine a world where the person who links to you controls your user experience.

Then there are some of the URL redirection services like tinyURL, bit.ly or ad.ly. On some of them, when they redirect they had an ad on the top. So even though you are now on the NY Times, there is an ad at the top from another service. They have been moving away from it lately, but there is experimentation.

I mentioned one example of intentionally poor design in Internet Explorer on my recent post about Microsoft. They intentionally take advantage of every typo and mis-step as an ad opportunity.

But as I found out this morning, there are a lot more players in the Internet chain that can take advantage of tricks like this. Today my ISP, Time Warner, wanted a piece of the typo pie too. My Firefox browser only corrects "yahoo" to "www.yahoo.com" if it first gets a 404 error from the initial request. But the ISP can do that work and just return a valid result off the initial request. So Time Warner wants a piece. Where else could they insert themselves? Couldn't they alter the HTML and create a frame just like Facebook?

There are many creative ways to make lots of incremental revenue based on the linking structure and inefficiencies and errors of the Internet. I've got a couple creative ideas, but the point is that every link has value. Value to the place you are linking to and value to the property you are linking from.

Here's another example. You may notice that every link on Facebook or on Google is not really a pure link to the website. If there is a link to the "www.NYTimes.com" when you click it, it actually activates a Javascript or other service on Google or Facebook to record the click, before sending you off to where you are going. Why is this important? For Google, recording what people are clicking is key to optimizing their algorithms. It started with optimizing ad clicks, then the same approach is being used for organic search. For Facebook, they similarly want to know what to show and whether that Fan page of yours is spewing spam, or links that people care about it. They prioritize good links in your feed to make your feed better.

The point is that there is a wealth of info from augmenting the simple version of the Internet, controlling data and controlling the display experience. The question, of course is what's next? Where are there unrealized revenue opportunities in the existing structure? Could there be a way to get pennies, millions of times a day? There are...

The Confluence of Digital Marketing and Traditional Brand Marketing

2009-12-27T06:41:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is a SVP of marketing for Bank of America that reminded me the importance of bridging the gaps between digital and traditional marketing. Now as a digital guy, I usually think about it in terms of what traditional marketing has to learn from the digital world, but this conversation reminded me that it's a biased approach.

Digital marketing, most specifically Internet marketing, is amazing in it’s exacting nature and real time feedback. I can put a campaign up targeting 36-45 year old married women who have expressed an interest in cheerleading and that day know what I spent, how many of them came to my site, whether they registered, whether they created a group on Weplay, whether they invited anyone and how much they spent. These are the important things to my business and I can know exactly how the campaign performed and make changes. Maybe I change the wording, the creative of the ad, and in fact on launch I probably had at least 2 versions up to test which one did better (A-B testing). And I probably A-B tested the landing page too. So I am constantly optimizing. As soon as I have enough data to declare a winner, I use that as a baseline and try a new test. As long as the incremental value is worth my effort, then I keep testing until I am a well-oiled machine.

Of course I also do this across all my campaigns, targeting and segments so I am slowly weeding out the campaigns that don’t perform so the aggregate performance is great. There are some tools that help with this automated bidding, since campaigns can be optimized by single metrics like cost per registration, cost per group, revenue per cost, etc. The key mantra is always be testing. Always be improving. The only creative, and thus human, decisions on an ongoing basis are wording and basic creative, which a very junior person can do. It’s a machine.

The problem is that traditional media doesn’t have the metrics and real-time feedback so this process is completely different. Imagine creating multiple TV commercials and trying to measure which one was more effective. Tough. Even if you had an answer, how long would it take to change the programming, the budget, reshoot a commercial and leverage that info. The tracking and correlation is difficult and takes too much time. Clicks are instantaneous. And imagine the damage of having a bad ad. I can quickly pull an ad off the Internet, each of the tests in digital are small so they don’t need the same level of effort, creative or buy in. Traditional marketing is slower, more time intensive and each campaign casts a wide net.

So the exact mantras of digital marketing set an unrealistic expectation for traditional marketing. And frankly, the digital guys look down on the traditional guys. How can you run a high cost marketing campaign and not know the ROI? Well, large enterprises have developed sophisticated models to help calculate the ROI, but it still is a little fuzzy and there are a lot of moving parts so you can test the overall ROI, but not pinpoint the exact phrasing, creative, or in store collateral that converted the customer.

But it’s too easy to get caught up in the glory of digital as my friend pointed out. For Bank of America, digital is fine, but they don’t run their business by pure cost per reg. People go into the banks to set up accounts. And measuring how the Internet ad affected consumer behavior and brand impression is not something us digital guys specialize in. When you care about branding and traditional commerce, we are less sophisticated specifically because it’s contrary to our exacting and real time philosophy. It’s not that we can’t apply the same models measuring the impression of a brand before and after an ad just like traditional media does with ad spots. We just don’t. It’s not that we can’t cast a wide net with a single ad to measure effect, it’s that we think it’s against our principles. Why not optimize and measure the clicks, exactly?

Well, it’s easy to forget in our digital fantasy that the world is more than clicks. For Bank of America, it’s brand that drives the business. When you think bank, who do you want to go to? And for a traditional media guy who believes in art as much of science, I imagine digital looks like task work for ajunior guy. It’s a tactic, not a strategy. I imagine they look down on us.

Well traditional media is declining and digital marketing is expanding, so we’ll see an increasing mix of exacting methodology. But in the process, I expect a lot of the traditional guys to come over and teach us digital guys a thing or two.

Why I Will Never Go Back to Microsoft

2009-12-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

Been a tough couple weeks since my hard drive crashed. First Mac issue and for a variety of stupid reasons, I hadn't backed it up in over a month. So it was off to data recovery for 2 weeks in which I squatted on a Dell.

After Mac-ing down for so long, you forget all the inefficiencies and annoyances of working in Windows, even XP. Something ironically called "SmartAlert" kept popping up telling me iexplore.exe wanted to access the Internet and I was in danger. That's right, Windows was warning me about it's own browser trying to connect to the Internet. Then my anti-virus software AVG. Then Excel. Crazy. Number of pop ups in one day? Guesses? 75. 75!!! Worst part is the checkbox that said remember the setting (Allow), which never seemed to remember. Uggg....

Or when I plugged in a monitor, I had to manually go into settings to activate it. As if me plugging in the monitor isn't statement enough of my intent. Yes, activate the monitor automatically.

Or the fact that in IE, unlike every other browser, doesn't recognize what you mean when you type in "NYTimes" without the ".com". Why not just try to add the ".com"? Well of course it opens up the search page and look it's and ad view opportunity.

And that's really the rub about Microsoft. They design products for their business not your life. They care about the ad view, not about your ease of use. And this is endemic to all their decisions, or lack their of (the other big design issue is that they cram everything in and don't know how to say no for the sake of simplicity). They want to bundle, cram, charge, lock you in, make it difficult to switch rather than build products you will adore.

And they deserve the criticism they get. Like the Apple ads lambasting them for not creating a migration from XP to Windows 7. You know there was a conversation about this where some draconian bastard stated the case that not creating a migration from 2 versions ago sets a precedent that users always have to go to the next version, which means more revenue.

Well, MSFT. I look at the bugginess of Excel on a Mac and all the intentional ways they hamper open browser standards and interoperability as a failing strategy. So I hold on to my Apple stock, revel in Linux-based netbooks and celebrate every point of market share lost.

I wonder if Microsoft actually has conversations about how little time they have resisting the wave of open standards at which point they will be ill positioned to compete with their culture of poor design and malicious practices.

In this, they are a perfect example of Michael Porter's framework on innovation, where established players find it too hard to undermine their core business by investing in disruptive technologies. It's too hard to align the organization's established departments with the ones trying to kill them. So you look at the profit potential of migrating the business and the risk and find that it is easier, and more importantly more profitable, to extract revenue from existing customers who lag the upcoming technology switch. Less investment, extract revenue.s

That's a lot of words that basically say that it is more profitable to slowly die as a dinosaur then to try to turn into a bird. Extinction is a slow, gradual process and is more than just a path of least resistance but sometimes an advantageous strategy.

That said, F U Microsoft for the literally billions of man hours lost from Vista and all your other recent "innovations."

I Speculate My Money Isn't Safe

2009-11-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

So I shorted the market. In fact, I double shorted it (DXD). I just can't believe that investors think we have recovered. Real unemployment/underemployment is nearing 20%, the worst levels since the Great Depression. Yet the economy grew at a 3.5% rate. Really? Ok so there was the stimulus package and even GM was up with cash for clunkers. But that really is just borrowing to pump up the numbers, and even that isn't helping employment.

Next year you have more ARMs than ever graduating to terrorist rates when the earning potential of mortgage owners is lower than ever. It's hard to imagine that the next wave of the housing crisis isn't just around the corner. So we are subsidizing home owners, renegotiating rates at a loss at government agencies and eating the losses at Mae family of institutions. We are borrowing to pump up the numbers.

And then we are printing money. Lots of it. Tanking the dollar, creating inflation which at the same time devalues our debt. We are borrowing to deflate our debts. But our debtors are none too happy with that.

In real terms, have we really seen an increase in the market? Seems like the market has performing at the exact inverse of the dollar. How much more can we borrow before everyone sees it's all a sham?

But there is also another side to the story, as my friend Simon points out. A market isn't necessarily built on fundamental values. The dollar is a fiat currency not tied to the value of gold. Profits can be manipulated. Future outlook is speculative. And at the end of the day, it's a virtual market with a certain supply of money and demand for stocks. Just like the oil speculation of 2006-2007, in which 10 times more oil was traded each day then is sold in a year, the stock markets behave according to supply and demand too. So Simon would argue that there is still a lot of money looking for investment. More demand for stocks than supply at the price.

Well that could be. And maybe, just maybe the market will go up speculatively. But all bubbles pop and eventually the bill for this has to get paid. I am happy we didn't have a total financial system reboot. But I think we are far from out of the woods. And most of my friends are beginning to run for the hills.

I am hedging my bets. Gold, foreign stocks and even shorting the Dow (although to a certain extent that's a bet against inflation). I am just not buying all this borrowing.

A Half Billion Reasons to Reform Election Laws

2009-10-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

I went to the New Jersey gubernatorial debates last weekend and it was a bit underwhelming. Not because my candidate, Chris Daggett, an independent with real ideas didn't clearly win like in his first debate or that his competition was clearly more polished than in their first debate, although all that didn't help. And not because the pre-debate rally wasn't fun. I secured a megaphone, led 50 people in cheers and made fun of the other candidates and their supporters (clever retorts about college republicans, bad suits and trench coats and raver antics). I even had a professor protect me from Corzine's union boys who were looking to get violent.

No, instead it was just another reminder of why this system is so screwed up. It took half a billion dollars to elect an eloquent, Harvard educated law professor against a party who led the collapse of two wars, the world financial markets and a major American city. Let's reiterate. $500 million. For one candidate. Maybe that's just $2 for each American. And maybe that's 7,000 more teachers. It's a big bloody number. Like a corporation. A conglomerate. If the democratic party were a corporation, it would be a fortune 100 company at the very least ($25 billion in revenue).

So why is campaign finance reform so hard? Do we really need all the TV ads? All the commercially directed, poll influenced, slandering attack ads that make you want to hot snack in your mouth. The complete lack of understanding of the policies, the counterpoints and any semblance of a policy debate is sickening, maybe even more than the fact that your average American couldn't understand it if it were to go on.

"Mr. Corzine, NJ is so far in debt it is on the verge of bankruptcy with a record deficit and debt burden. How do you get back to fiscal sanity without constricting the fragile economy with higher taxes? You have 1 minute, sir, and please contrast your plan with each of your opponents'."

What a joke. Just enough to smile, spin and throw someone under a bus.

Isn't it simpler? Drastically less money for commercials. More mandatory debates with a round table format, lengthy answers, candidate questions to each other and full back and forth. Specifics to plans mandated. No BS Palinesque avoidance answers.

We live in a world where the more you say, the more material your opp0nents have to attack from their war chest on mainstream TV. Ideas are penalized. Marketing speak rewarded.

I saw today on CNN that 7 out of the top 10 radio shows are conservative talk shows. So much for liberal media right? Yet 65% of America believe in the public option. In the battle of ideas, Democrats are winning. No, no. That's not right. It's more of a liberal trend with which Democrats are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If the Democrats could get their ideas straight, they could change the political game to reduce the election process to ideas.

Maybe that's naive. Maybe the Democrats know that they are just as bad at talking about ideas as, well, a third grader. But how can they think that they will get more money than the big business Republicans. And who wouldn't support massive campaign finance reform? Wouldn't they win big votes by being anti big business and pro voter? You could be the voters' party.

I don't get it. But this spectacle has all the intellectual honesty, strategic intricacy and the production values of a McDonald's commercial. Well, I saw it first hand. Sorry to say it. But I'm not lovin' it.

The Crumbling Internet

2009-10-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

The reporting hasn't been widespread, but I think the Internet is crumbling under it's own weight. Two massively popular services, Facebook and YouTube seem to be buckling. On YouTube, videos regularly get caught in a buffering state or don't start at all and the page needs to be refreshed. On Facebook, CDN loading times are lagging ("waiting for fbcdn.net ...") and more than occasionally I get the network transport error. And yes, I see it on other people's machines on multiple types of networks. It's just unreliable. Not unworkable. Just nagging enough.

Now interestingly enough both of these services have recently, and surprisingly, reported that they are near or at profitability well ahead of schedule. While many have talked about the surprising success of Facebook ads, especially the ad budgets of games like Farmville, I think it is more than coincidence that these performance issues are happening now.

The funniest commercial I have seen on TV lately has been the Verizon Wireless commercial "there's a map for that." Poking fun at AT&T's network is a little too easy. But it's too easy to take your natural lead in a market and cut costs to maximize profitability. You still have your features. Your bells and whistles. Your network value (Metcalfs Law). Your brand equity. But you have undercut your users for the sake of cost.

Would cell phone carriers have taken off if they were this spotty to begin with? Would Facebook be as popular if it were regularly frustrating? There's a natural cycle to businesses where you spend less time innovating and more time profiting from the existing market position. This tends to happen in a waning market, where long term iterative innovation just won't have an effective ROI. Disruptive innovation and creative destruction then rules, and new ventures open up new markets.

But it's way too early. This market has just begun. Premium video is being flanked by Hulu and other popular and accepted premium VOD services. It's easier than ever to discover content with video search engines. Netflix is poised to supplant cable. Now is not the time to alienate users.

And Facebook. You've got analysts saying that the future of digital advertising is about leveraging social network data to provide more effective ads. Facebook is now the leading photo sharing site on the Internet. And it's the biggest video game platform. It's the largest event planning site. But you have threats from Open Social, micro communities like Ning and yes, Weplay.

And so I find myself using Facebook a little less. Maybe it is become I am busy, but also because it is slow and clunky. And I am reading ACLU reports on how Facebook apps give away your friends info without their permission. And I am thinking to myself, is a backlash really possible? Is something that is so much a staple to many, really so vulnerable? Well, I have had a couple friends leave Facebook in the last week. Maybe it's too early to milk the business. Maybe the cookie is crumbling.

You Talk Too Much, Homeboy You Never Shut Up

2009-08-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

I am embarrassed that after a month this is my blog post. But maybe it's the spark I need.

I was in San Fran this weekend talking to a friend who said that he was both loquacious and eloquent. It struck me as weird. Maybe because of the alliteration and reuse of the Latin base for voice. But it was more.

On the plane I realized it. Someone who is loquacious may think they are eloquent. Hopefully so, if only to justify their yapping. But it is doubtful it seems to me that an eloquent person would call themselves loquacious.

Hence, if you say you are eloquent and loquacious, the reality is you probably just talk a lot.

Q.E.D.

Independence and Gay Pride

2009-07-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

Happy July 4th, everyone. Been a while since I blogged but there’s been plenty on my mind. With all the talk of independence on this day, my mind naturally wandered to the gay pride parade last weekend. What a show. Other than Halloween, I don’t know another day where so many take to the streets and challenge you. It’s kind of an odd comparison, but if you look at the pictures, the outfits were indeed a form of creative expression and a challenge of identity.

Whatever your feeling on gay rights, gay marriage, or even the morality of being gay, it’s impossible to deny the happiness of this day of pride in the eyes, smiles, hugs and celebratory gestures of all those who partook in it.

Growing up in Greenwich Village, I have been surrounded by homosexuality most of my life. You know, if an open 10% of the population can surround … As a result, I am much more sympathetic to their cause. The fact that they have a day of pride, only highlights that most days they combat shame. And it just reminds me of the hypocrisy of religious zealots, who seem to have taken the old testament lessons of intolerance from new testament readings. I am not sure how Republicans hijacked Jesus, but they sure don’t do a good job following his lessons of tolerance. How do you think he might greet and welcome a homosexual? I woudn't classify Christians as taking the Mary Magdeleine approach.

Lately, with the ideological collapse of the Republican party and the rise of jargonistic rhetoric, it seems that principles are used as oratorical tools rather than rules of guidance. You hear a lot about states rights in Supreme Court nominations and matters of political idealogy. But doesn’t it seem strange that the same people who vehemently defend state rights as a fundamental justification for banning abortion are the same people who are against states rights to declare gay marriage or pot legalization in another state? Same legal principle, just playing both sides of the argument as it suits your needs.

Particularly today, I think we should all take a look at what it means to be independent. What this day really celebrates. About taking a risk. Bucking the established dogma. Refusing to adhere to old rules. Declaring a higher level of freedom from what we know and maybe what we have ever seen. The rules at this point are perverse anyway.

What is the world we want to create for ourselves and for others? Embody the change you want to create in the world. Especially if that means being independent.

Learning to bag the bags

2009-06-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

I was surfing around at the Webby awards and found that our Peyton Manning video that we shot with CAA was nominated for best video piece in sports (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nKMKW4X8RE&eurl=http%3A%2F%25).

Pretty cool. I looked around to see what else was nominated, what was popular, what was working. I happened upon a video of Edward Norton who was in a community service ad pitching for us to stop using plastic and paper bags (http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/environment/going-green-environment/conservation-in-action/norton-bag-env.html) .

Although ours was better, it piqued my interest. Some interesting facts. There is a floating island the size of Texas in the ocean and it's made up entirely of plastic waste. Bags, bottles, and all the plastic that is around us. Texas! That's crazy. But even that piece didn't really hit home, it just sat there marinating.

A week ago I posted a video on the story of stuff, which was excellent and somehow with multiple pings the message started hitting home. My eyes creaked open. Our culture is built on unnecessary waste to support our lazy convenience. And now I see it everywhere, and my veil of ignorance has been lifted. It is astounding how blind I have been.

Here's my work day of unnecessary waste/convenience and what I have done about it:

1. Woke up, alarm blazing and on my way to the shower tripped over two boxes from clothing shipped from the Gilt group. Emailed them about order consolidation and benefits to them.

2. Noticed the toilet paper was out so I unwrapped a roll from the paper in the 8 pack plastic bag. Wrapping in a wrapping? Unneeded but I have no influence

3. Recycling was overflowing, so I took it out. Will not tell my dinner guests to drink less wine. It was too much fun. And no wine boxes. Alas.

4. Got on the bus with my copy of the NY Metro, which I threw out 5 minutes later. Now reading from the NY Times app for the iPhone. Won’t take another NY Metro.

5. Ordered my standard breakfast from Ruthy’s Deli, and refused the paper bag and the excessive napkins that came with it. Just hand over the egg white sandwich.

6. Drank 4 large green teas all out of my reusable OXO coffee cup using bulk tea leaves rather than packaged teabags.

7. Went to Chelsea Thai for lunch, told them it was to stay when it was to go and took the plate upstairs and returned it at the end of the day.

8. My boss asked me if I wanted a bottle of water and I responded by telling him the environmental impact of shipping water in plastic bottles. Switched the office to a Brita filter.

9. Got two bottles of wine for a dinner party, they gave me a bag, a plastic netting for one of the bottles and a cardboard separator. Told them to bag the bag and I would carry the bottles in my laptop bag.

10. Went to Whole Foods to pick up 2 (would be double) bags of ingredients for dinner, bought recycled bags for future use.

11. Got home and saw a ton of marketing mails. Ripped up 6 or 7 without even looking. Went online and removed myself and my mom from Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference List (https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/regist.action) and the Do Not Call List (https://www.donotcall.gov/) while I was at it. Here are some other tips (http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs4-junk.htm)

No real inconvenience (time loss 3 mins), yet I sound like a fluffy, tree hugging radical. But simple steps saved a newspaper, 2 sets of excessive napkins, 4 plastic cups, 4 tea bags, 1 styro foam food container, 10 bottles of water daily in the office, 1 plastic netty thing, a piece of cardboard, 6 pieces of mail and at least 7 bags.

Now that’s a lot for a single day. Multiply that by 250 million people and 365 days (91,250,000,000). No wonder we have a problem.

All I ask is that you just look around at all the waste in your day. You may start down the same path as I have. I like my luxuries as much as everyone else. But convenience isn’t all that it is cracked up to be if it comes with so much garbage.

Measuring from Baseline

2009-05-31T20:13:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting conversation tonight with the esteemed Liz Topp and the lovely Miss Clemmer. We were talking about happiness in New York. New York is a special kind of place. The city that never sleeps. The city where anything can happen, or more to the point anything does happen all the time. Is this infinite carnival of culture, culinary adventure and continuous partying the perfect recipe for happiness?

Perhaps it depends on your metabolism for consumption. As a child of New York, raised and molded by it's frenetic hands, I have always loved the constant stimulation and unlimited potential. When I lived in Austin, I distinctly missed walking in traffic and seeing a couple thousand people each and every day. The endless possibilities of each and every night. Who might call with the 411 on some soiree? Where might the next turn lead?

But is this really the environment for happiness? Kristen realized it was her time to go one night when I called her with an invite to a intimate party with Liv Tyler, Leonardo DiCaprio, and even Keith Richards (who BTW looks many decades past dead). She was just 3 blocks away and just didn't care. She was too tired. At that moment she realized, NYC was just not the right pace. Mainlining adventure was not her thing.

Austin is more Kristen's pace. Where scarcity breeds appreciation. Where 1 great event a week is plenty, and well appreciated for all that it is. Where distinct amazing times are not lost in a blur of velocity. Where appreciation trumps frequency.

Happiness is relative to a baseline. Where's your natural baseline and are you living your life that way?

Chivalry and the Toilet Seat

2009-05-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

I think I have spent more time than most thinking about the age old dilemna of the toilet seat. I never really bought the whole fall in the toilet argument. I mean really, who doesn't look down when putting your bare ass on a surface? I do every time, and it really is because of one time I didn't in a public bathroom. The details are too unnerving to describe. But I don't think it's just me.

So what is it then? A mathematical approach to the problem aiming to minimize the total effort of the system reveals that I should not put down the toilet seat to avoid the useless effort of putting down the seat only to lift it back up in the event the males of the household go twice in a row. So conveniently, minimization of effort leads us to believe that I shouldn't put it down.

Then again, if effort minimization is the absolute goal, I should just always go with the toilet seat down, and we wouldn't want that would we? Cleanliness is key.

So I am not such a big fan of public bathrooms. You never know what the last guy had on their hands when they pulled the flusher handle or even the faucet at the sink. So I try to avoid contact. Using your shoed feet is a big help here. This includes, probably more than anything else the toilet seat. Women may not be as privvy to the joy of lifting the seat to discover the untold splatter whether fresh or dried. Needless to say, it's never a positive moment in my day.

And that's what I think this is all about. If I put the toilet seat down, a woman doesn't have to encounter arguably - and hopefully - the least sanitary surface in the house. And that is a simple enough luxury to make demands.

But, I have never heard this sentiment expressed directly. Is this it? If so, I think I can put it down. But I am going to do it like I do it in the public bathroom, with my shoe. ;) See, we can all win.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it

2009-05-12T12:40:00.001-07:00

I continue to be reminded in every day conversations both in business and socially that how you demonstrate the idea is almost as important as the idea itself. And with the struggles we have in healthcare, the economy and the environment, it's almost impossible to see the big picture.

Is 1 trillion dollars enough of a stimulus package? Does cutting 1.5% of health care cost growth save the system? How important is domestic recycling to the problem of waste management (Answer: domestic waste is 1/70th of industrial waste).

As annoying as the UPS commercials are, they do show the power of graphical teaching through video. Here's an even better example, one that predated UPS's chalkboard that brilliantly explains the environmental challenges we face.

http://storyofstuff.com/

Einstein once responded to a woman's questions about math, "Do not worry about your difficulties with math. I assure you mine are greater." The focus being on the untold complexity of Einstein's understanding. Instead, think about the relative simplicity of the woman's mathematical model.

With ideas as groundbreaking as we are throwing around, how do you let people build simple, comprehensible understandings of things that are complex beyond their reach?

Perot did it with chicken farming in Arkansas. Gore did it with global warming. And TED does it with everything. Shouldn't we be creating video presentations rather than press releases and press conferences?

PS Let me reiterate check out http://storyofstuff.com/

A Map of Wine and Food

2009-03-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

Speaking of teaching ... have you ever wondered how to pair food with wine? This map breaks down the relationships and dimensions in flavor better than any I have seen. Thanks to old HS acquaintance Alex Rainert for showing me the way.

Image URL: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3595/3320616722_9f66888b24.jpg

A couple things to note. Oregon Pinot Noir is in the center, meaning it is one of the most amenable wines to bring to a dinner party if you don't know what's being served. It also shows how Filet Mignon is to Ribeye as Turkey is to Duck as Parmesan is to Gruyere. Simply great!

To Love to Teach

2009-03-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

Almost everything I have done professionally and in most of the other meaningful accomplishments, it's really been about teaching. Sales was teaching a client how we could help. Outbound marketing is teaching customers what you provide to them. Inbound marketing is about teaching your dev team what to build to meet market demand. Marrying Ira and Joanne was about teaching others about why this moment was indeed sacred. Raising your children is about teaching each and every moment.

One of my favorite moments last year was teaching my friend's Marisa's Kindergarten class about Antarctica. It was just so much fun to cultivate that wide eyed amazement of children and hopefully inspiring them to explore. It gave me the inspiration to go back to my own school and lecture.

Here is a little blurb about me in Scholastic. It reminds me to teach and consequently to learn every day.

http://blogs.scholastic.com/prek_k/2009/03/learning-about-habitats-polar.html

The Challenge: A Recess from Excess

2009-03-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

These times wreak of the times of old. Neronian reforms while the infrastructure crumbles. Maybe. But it has been a time of excessive greed. And while it is easy to look at the greed and self-indulgence of Wall Street, it's quite harder to look inward.

I don't consider myself materially self indulgent. I have bought one electronic item of significance in the past 5 years. I like clothes, but I wouldn't say I am a shop-a-holic like many I know. I save 30% of my salary every month without fail (although that amount seems a lot smaller in my ETrade account as of late). No, my area of self indulgence is food.

After myriad cooking classes, dinners out, and just growing up on Il Mulino, my desire, appreciation and discerning palette is probably my greatest example of self indulgence. Every year I challenge myself to give up something self-indulgent for a month. Last year it was alcohol. This year it is all the beautiful cuts and preparations of red meat.

No lamb. No veal. No steak. No hamburgers at Royale. No all beef hot dogs at Grey's Papaya. Pastrami sandwiches at Katz's. No carnitas plate at Yuca bar. No tender filets or the swappable tender and marbled king of steak, the porterhouse. It has been to date, well, surprisingly easy.

And I would like to tell you how these abstinences make me feel healthy and alive, but they don't really. That's probably the most dissapointing, and perhaps the most encouraging. The body is incredibly adept at processing whatever you throw at it. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the recent evidence that a low fat diet has no effect on health (a low calorie diet does).

No this is a matter of testing will. Testing what you think you can do. And declaring independence from all the self-imposed constraints. To me it's not about pious sacrifice, it's about challenging the rules. Challenging what you think is out of your control.

What do you think is out of your control? Want to test that theory?

Human Feedback Feeds the Machine

2009-03-04T13:40:00.000-08:00

Ahhh ... yes. I love it when someone I know comments on my blog and points me to some cool things based on my post. Big shout out to Brian Delassandro for following up on my post on networking the human mind to solve really hard problems, That's Using Your Noggin.

Brian points us to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a way to request the services of a network of knowledge workers. What could you use it for?

What could you do with a million simple tasks? A billion? A trillion?

Fighting Gravity

2009-03-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

I think many of us spend a lot of time fighting gravity. I spent a weekend ago snowboarding and I know I spent a lot of time doing it. When I hit the occasional patch of ice that made me go fast (yes, east coast slopes), I would turn my board more to get a better edge to slow down. The problem is that you aren’t that effective anyway, and then when you hit a patch of snow again I would slow down way too fast, like getting hit by a car. And then I would go flying Superman style for a spectacular flop.

After a couple times of this, I decided to speed up during the patches of ice and go with the ice flow. I went a little faster than I wanted. Not fully in my control. But then when I was back on familiar terrain I was in a position I wanted to be and just cruised right through.

Such is gravity. 9.8 meters per second squared. Constant acceleration. Exponential velocity curve.

My Uncle Arthur tried to fight gravity in the army too. His gravity was the general perception that he was a Jew. And given this was during the Korea War, prejudices ran stronger than they do today. Arthur continued to flounder as he tried roles others assumed he was less fit for until he got reprimanded and was put in charge of acquisition of supplies.

Essentially, he was Red from Shawshank Redemption. The guy who could get you what you needed. In a more appropriate M.A.S.H. context, he was B.J. Honeycut or Hawkeye making trades with other units under the radar. What a perfect job for a “Jew” and so he excelled, accelerating with the natural gravity of the situation.

At the same time, some of the greatest leaders of our time have been able to resist and overcome gravity, creating revolutionary ideas that changed the gravities of their time. But how do you know when to do which?

I find myself coming to the same conclusions as astronauts. Sometimes when caught in the inevitable pull of gravity the best idea is to embrace it, speed towards in that direction and just before hitting the object and crashing, fire all thrusters in a lateral move and slingshot past it. Then you are free to navigate any direction you choose. It's about using gravity to reach escape velocity. In astrophysics it's called gravity assist.

What gravity are you fighting right now? Should you be fighting it or using it?

Just Downright Heartless

2009-02-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

I was reading an interesting book on design driven development called The Inmates are Running the Asylum . One of the passages struck me in that development nerds, tech geeks, were the new bullying jocks of the tech world. It had some interesting analogies and examples I could relate to. Where physical prowess was power back then, knowledge is power now.

And there are the good jocks and the really nasty bullies impressed with their own strength. I was reading Wired this month and noticed a new word on the fringe: cloaker. Apparently, doctors use radio signals to adjust the setting of pacemakers. Better than a USB port. Makes sense. Apparently some tech-savvy predators have designed devices that can mimic these signals so they can prey upon sickly patients. What would submit to if someone literally had the key to your heart?

Cloakers are a new method that masks the signal and keeps us safe from the tech predators. But man is that cold ...

Cheese of the Month: Epoisses

2009-02-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

Well, this blog is more than big ideas and serious topics. I want to lend my expertise in other areas. Like food. God, do I love food. And few food items are as exquisite, diverse and yet so ubiquitous as cheese. And cheese is one of the stranger foods out there. In order to preserve the dairy products (milk, cream, butter) the solution is to let the bacteria and yeast grow? Of course! I wonder how many failed experiments happened here where people ate absolutely ranky cheese before the right balance and formula was reached.

But I digress...

If you do appreciate cheese and you know me well enough to understand how good a food must be to highlight it here, then you should be getting your coat on right now to go and purchase what I am about to recommend.

Without further ado. The first highlighted cheese.

Epoisses, a favorite of Napolean, is absolutely one of my favorite cheeses. It is made by soaking the rind in the local liquor from Bourgogne giving it an organic orange color. It has pungent odor, but the flavor is mild and oaky with a complex finish that makes you wonder why you ever bought that El Presidente brie that is really glorified butter. At room temperature - which you must serve it at - it is gooey enough to run, like a beautiful chocolate souffle, but has enough consistency not to get messy or separate into a liquidy mess. It is A.O.C. certified, which means the preparation has to adhere to specific historic methods. No copying or bastardization. It's the real deal and it is unpasteurized. It is divine.

Here's the long and the short of it. If you are looking for a creamy (you might say brie-like, but I woudln't insult it that way) cheese for your palatte, you would be hard pressed to find a better cheese than Epoisses. And yes, you can find it at Whole Foods. If you coat's on, I would run and go get it now. Oh and get a nice Burgundy to enjoy with it.

Acknowledging our Responsibilities to Change

2009-02-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

I hope 2009 will be the year we start re-establishing democracy in America. As I noted in my earlier blog entry, democracy here has been under attack. The basis of our liberties have been compromised and our moral standing as a nation in question.

While on vacation, I read a couple books and finished Naomi Wolf’s Give Me Liberty. I thought one of the more striking points that she made is the simple lack of education and awareness of the fundamentals of our democracy. After reading several educational pieces in the NY Times this week, the situation seems pretty dire. You are more likely to get the right multiple-choice answers about fundamental documents, ideas or people who shaped our nation by flipping a coin than by asking an American.

At this point, you might say to yourself, yeah it is sad. All those people. Not so fast, mon frère. Let’s start with a simple test.

Take the Declaration of Independence. Most Americans will default to the only sentence they know. The first (of the second paragraph). How sad an ADHD generation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

But while the document is about equality and universal empowerment of the people, it is more about a statement of purpose – not only independence from the government of England, but more interestingly government in general. In typical 18th century argumentation, the most important arguments are at the end, the sentences no one can recite. What is most interesting in re-reading the old prose is that not that it sets up the ability for citizens to revolt against oppressive government, it demands the responsibility of the citizens that indeed they do.

How lost on our generation as we have rolled over with minimal resistance while our government has transferred wealth from us to the ultra-rich, violated Geneva conventions and more. How do we re-empower the people. Everyone feels so helpless. This is not what John Hancock and all the founders risked their lives for. The reason his signature is so large is that he knew he was signing his death warrant if they were to lose. We have lost all sense of sacrifice in our mail order microsuede couch world. Perhaps it is time for everyone to review and rethink about the peaceful ways we can revolt. And yes, I have a plan for me and one for Obama (coming soon). Take a read ...

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

So you may not be able to take out the US government. But it is time we provide new Guards for our future security. And that's more then just one election.

Now That's Using Your Noggin

2009-01-23T13:58:00.000-08:00

Remember that SETI screensaver from the early days of the Internet? Brilliant, right? Harness unused CPU cycles from desktops around the world to solve a hard problem broken into bits. But we didn't find aliens. Or if we did, no one told us. And we probably sucked more electricity out of the wall causing global warming which may have increased our need for an alien lifeline. But that's not the point.

There's another company who's business is founded on applying the exact same principle. Google. They have hundreds of thousands if not millions of cheap servers breaking down search and other computational heavy problems into tiny bits and then reassembling them to get the answer. They call the algorithm MapRedu ce and have given a watered down version to the world in the open-source Hadoop. And when you get hired by Google they ask you, "What problem would you solve if you had limitless computational power?" Now that's employee onboarding!

But there are lots of problems computers are terrible at solving. Image recognition. Language recognition. Complex pattern matching. But the human brain is pretty good at these tasks. (Great book on this is On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins). What if you could coordinate a massive human effort to solve these problems? What if you could get everyone in line more than the North Koreans? What problem would you solve?

Well, like many great technological movements, the pornography industry has figured it out. You can now get free, quality porn on the Internet if you just solve some "Captchas" for them. Captchas are those letter scrambles that make sure you are human when you go to Ticketmaster or register for a new service. Here is an example:

Well, if you can get someone to crack these, you can start doing nefarious things like infiltrate and spam people on other services or reserve those tickets I want. Since that makes money, it's a different revenue stream for the porn industry. Not quite legal though. And certainly not admirable.

But look to our scientists. They have taken a similar principle and applied to protein analysis. And it's an app called FoldIt. How cool is that? By getting users to solve 3D problems folding proteins you are actually contributing to a medical database about how to target proteins with drugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGYJyur4FUA

Imagine if every turn of your Rubik's cube contributed towards a cure for AIDS? Now that's pretty cool. It would be even better if you abstracted the problem so you didn't know that it was a protein problem.

What would you do if you had unlimited human analysis and a way to incentivize them to apply it?

Find anomolies in the US budget? The new accounting test and game brought to you by Obamatronics
Choose the hottest person in America. Facebook profile challenge creates a trillion page views and makes the company profitable through contextual ads for beauty enhancement products. Ok. Less cool. More fun.
Transcribe all the video in the world? Language learning game brought to you by the Google Library project.

There are some cool problems we could solve and we have barely touched the surface.

The Big O: Aspirational, yes. Inspirational, no.

2009-01-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

Lest you think the last one was a fluke...

I may have been one of the only people who watched Obama's speech and felt it missed something. It was so refreshing to listen to an eloquent president, let alone one who can at least speak the language. And sure, the speech was honest about our challenges. It made us proud to be Americans and of our history. It assuaged us into thinking "we" are up for the challenge. Other than the workers taking reduced hours to save another's job, what is really being asked of the American people? And who is "we"?

There were millions of people on that lawn, more watching their TV sets at the workplace with each other, huddled in the lobby of the Chelsea Market and standing in Times Square. But while we all left feeling better about being Americans, I think we all left alone.

Part of me yearned for a cheap parlor trick. "Look to the left, look to the right, we all stand together and will rise up as one. These are the people in whom we trust and who will bring us out of this. Our fates are in each others hands. " I felt like there was such an opportunity to connect us and tell us how we can help.

But I don't think he knows yet. There is such momentum with Obama, the idea more so than the man. But while we have participated and elected Obama, it was only an election. Obama is still just a promise. And I think, if played right, Obama is a responsibility.

How do you take this speech and convert it into action. How do you take the principles of grassroots empowerment, galvanizing the influencers and turn it into meaningful action?

How do you move from making us aspire to be better Americans to inspiring us to act?

Big O may not know yet. But don't worry, America. Trevor's got a plan. More on that later.

The Beginning: It's the End of the World as We Know It

2009-01-17T21:41:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone. Been a long while since I last wrote my blog, but it is has been itching at me every week, maybe even every day as new ideas come into my head and I say to myself, “Man, I should really blog about that.” But it’s a new year. And I got my final reminder today from a good friend and an extra nudge tonight. So I am back. Now you might think that with this much thought this post will be pure brilliance, but the reality is that this will be like any other post, special in its own way, but no specialer. That’s right. I said specialer.

It’s also good timing in that I heard an inspirational talk with Naomi Wolf this week. While made famous by her feminist contribution, The Beauty Myth, Naomi (who I have met socially) was discussing the tremendous threat to democracy we are currently facing. At first glance, her theory that the US is on the path to a totalitarian state was most easily dismissed as conspiracy theory. Our confidence in democracy is not easily shaken. But she then outlined the predictable elements of the demise of the democratic society, using Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece and many other countries as examples. Here are some common examples and they are eery:

• Creating an external threat to focus fear. Iraq. The never ending War on Terror.
• Setting up civilian surveillance without judicial review. Hello Patriot Act.
• Military presence in major cities. We are now in violation of the constitution by having more than the National guard in our cities. Count em, 20K troops. And the military is training our police now.
• Voter suppression. Calling an active campaign dedicated to voter suppression “voting irregularities” is disingenuous.
• Setting up interrogation bases above the law. Suspending habeas corpus. Holding citizens without allegations. Torturing prisoners. Gitmo.

Now it’s been clear to me for sometime that Bush’s assault on the constitution has been very real. All my life I have been taught as the basis of privacy that you can’t wiretap without a warrant. And yet, we have conceded these tenets of our democracy so easily. Hell, we even openly violate the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention! Who is America?

Now, I always thought it was because Bush was an autocrat, and a bumbling idiot of one. Just a guy who says god talks to him and thinks he is above the law. Perhaps his idiocy disguised a much more malevolent plot. Perhaps as he said in one of his final press conferences we always “misunderestimated” him. Is it really that hard to believe that you could tilt the balance of our delicate democracy to systematically favor the party in power? Hint: look up Gerrymandering or the recent punitive actions against bi-party lobbyists.

Have we not felt like we have lost our voice? Our impact? With no bid contracts, cronyism, the polarization of the 2 party system resulting in a tyranny of the majority, has the government not been so subverted by special interests that we can legitimately question our democratic ideals?
Could this all have been orchestrated? Planned in a way to secure power for a few individuals? Perhaps their goal was much more malevolent.

Now the election of Obama certainly gives us hope. But perhaps this great achievement was in part made possible by the information age with cell phone cameras, YouTube uploads, and a culture of citizen reporting catching the very irregularities that could swing elections. And believe me, Obama will need us to push any meaningful change. He is 1 man, 1 gun. We are millions, his ammunition.

To reclaim our democracy, we must continue to embrace our ability to make our voices heard. To challenge the threats we too easily have come to accept. To protest meaningfully. To pressure our representatives into action. To force our agenda through State and National Referenda. If the Morman church can sneak Prop 8 into liberal California, what could a city like New York do? Or your local community. Or Obama’s email list. And if New York can do it, maybe all it takes is one Michael Bloomberg. One man convinced to push. It starts with you.

Are you ready to push? It sounds hard because you don’t know how. Naomi’s new book, Give Me Liberty, A Handbook for American Revolutionaries is about showing you the way to make that voice heard. We are the ones who have handed over our democracy. Maybe, just maybe, the threat is so serious that it is time we take it back.

God forbid we go into the annals of history grouped with the citizens of early Nazi Germany writing in our diaries, “I don’t have to speak up yet. It couldn’t get worse.”

Fah Q Motorola

2008-01-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Ok. That's it. It's over. My "new" Motorola Q started acting up again, the 8th time in 18 months!!! I asked them to send me the newer one that is supposed to be stable, and they informed me that I am eligible to upgrade to the new Q for $100 off, or $400 with a new contract. In fact, they insisted that they wouldn't replace my phone so I would do this. I threw a fit. They are sending me a new one, probably broken. I am going to sell it on eBay.

But forget that. I just activated my new iPhone and I will see you in hell Verizon. These antics just cost you $2500 per year. Let's just hope I can stand AT & T ...

Stupidity on Steroids

2007-12-18T13:03:00.000-08:00

Maybe it is just me, but the outrage and ruckus about the Mitchell report and steroid use in baseball is laughable. Did people really think US athletes being paid tens of millions a year for athletic performance weren't using illegal substances? Did they think that baseball, experiencing a resurgant popularity after the strike mostly because of the home run records, would be incentavised to effectively monitor its players and reduce their performance?

That's naivete. The reporting itself, is just plain stupid. After A-Rod denies using any "steroids, hormones, or other performance enhancing substances" why not ask "so you never used protein shakes?" Of course he has. And vitamins. And creatine monohydrate. Hell, I use all that stuff, or have. Each of these is performance enhancing and the list goes on endlessly.

And oh, the outrage that Andy Petitte used Human Growth Hormone (HGH) for 2 days - when it was legal at the time! What's the problem, people? The problem is setting policy and enforcing it in an open manner.

I think the issue is black and white - as in listing. There are two basic approaches to access control, blacklisting and whitelisting. Black listing is about maintaining a list of banned substances. This is on the whole what they have been doing. The problem is that drugs are evolving so fast, that a crafty chemist can find a loophole. And it takes time to discover it, research the substance, and then add it to the blacklist. But that is the general approach.

If baseball was in fact serious about this issue, and especially the effect on children, it might implement a whitelist approach, where a list of allowed substances is managed. Everything else is off limits. If you want to take something, submit it to the board, if it gets approved, then you can take it. Otherwise, you can get prosecuted for it. The downside of this approach is the overhead of maintaining an active stance on substance legality. You would have to setup baseball's mini-FDA. But, it makes the rules clear at all times, it gives no player with a secret potion an advantage since everyone has access to the whitelist, and it also sets a hardline stance of what is safe, which for outsiders, especially kids, is important.

Lastly, the testing and enforcement process needs to be transparent. Random and frequent drug testing should be mandatory. If you can pay A-Rod $300 million, you can ask him to pee in a cup every week. And every other player for that matter. Twice a week in the post season. If you don't like it, I am sure there are other professions that will pay you your millions. And the report on no shows, effectivity, etc. should be scrutinized by a committee or other open body. The penalties should be clearly spelled out, and enforced. Do we really need the US Congress to step in?

And by the way, it't not just baseball. But basketball. Football. Hockey. And every other conceivable sport. God forbid if I have to endure this scandal for each one separately.

America should stop being the pansy in the corner thinking about how honorable sports and the importance of living a childhood dream. Our honor rests on much more these days and it's time to grow up a little. It's entertainment, not chivalry.

Sports federations should stop being a roid raged bum of an athlete focused on immoral acts for the gain of the sport. If you want to project honor, be honorable. If you want to make money, open it up and be a businessman. Hell, let's start an altered Olympics. Anything goes. That's entertainment!

But most of all, can they take this off the front page? There is a war going on. A new presidential campaign. A million people might lose their homes. Iran just got enriched uranium from Russia. Economists are talking about stagflation. And it's Christmakwanzicah.

Motorola Q-uitter

2007-12-16T16:46:00.000-08:00

It's hard to imagine a more important service in you life: your phone. The number of people who now rely solely on their mobile phone has increased 10 fold in the past 5 years. But as phones get more complicated, constantly pushing the bleeding edge, they frequently experience issues. But this is just ridiculous.

In the past 18 months, my Motorola Q with Windows Mobile has had to be replaced 5 times because of issues. That's a shocking 3-4 months mean time between failure. That's crazy!! Every time I have had it replaced, it takes several hours at the Verizon store, plus shipping the new phone, plus shipping the old phone back and all the ancillary activity. Plus, the stores have to coordinate with the Verizon call center. All this must cost a tremendous amount. With slim margins, how can Verizon be making money here?
Maybe my experience is isolated. But according to the Verizon shop out in La Jolla, this is all too common.

They told me that I should get the Blackberry which works like a charm. Well, great. Let's replace it. They then proceeded to try to charge me $600. So after spending $500 on a phone that is a complete lemon, it's time to draw the line. I am calling Verizon tomorrow and demanding a different model or I am out. $100 bucks says it's an iPhone from AT & T and I want Verizon to know exactly why! I actually am looking forward to getting on the phone with them because I know it costs them $6.

I guess this is how you take your most valuable customers and turn them into enemies. If you offer high end products to the most demanding market segment and they are terrible, the tarnished reputation will follow you.

Hasta la vista, Motorola and Verizon.

Nothing to Fear but the Lack of Fear

2007-12-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

I wrote awhile back that it was quite odd to interact with the animals in the Galapagos because they were completely fearless of natural predators. There are no wolves, bears, or other carnivorous mammals, so why would birds, turtles, or sea lions be afraid of me? It suggests a wonderful utopian nature built without primal fear.

But outside of the Galapagos, predators are everywhere. And so squirrels in Central Park scurry away, birds keep their distance, and deer stand at watch with their nervous gaze, ready for flight in an instant. That’s the natural state of things.

I guess that’s why I should be more suspicious of animals that don’t fear me. This week I went scuba diving off the Channel Islands in California. It was the last dive of the trip. As Matt, Rob, our divemaster, and I all descended down the anchor line in our dry suits, we noticed an odd looking ray near the bottom. It has the body of a ray, flounderish, and round, like an odd alien craft. About two and half feet in diameter, it was hovering and undulating just above the sand, its little membrane covered eyes almost hidden. It also has the tail of a shark, making it look like a strange mutant of a creature, further suggesting its antiquity and rarity, and of course making it even more interesting to explore and interact with.

The animal was calm at our approach and I floated towards it with small, slow kicks that were designed not to agitate the sand and cloud the waters. Within seconds I was face to face with it, both of us hovering inches above the sand. Rob and Matt watched as I came face to face with it. A diver took photos. All of a sudden it flipped vertically and I was confronted with its fishy, white underbelly, and 8 inch mouth with small sharp teeth. It went towards my face, and I flipped backward in instinctual defense. It was like the incubator animal in Alien, and it immediately jarred me. Not that this little thing could hurt me, or so I thought. So I relaxed and re-approached. Almost immediately it laid back on down on the sand and so did I, and it came up to me and rubbed by my neoprene covered hand. After another minute, it scooted off.

As I got back on the boat and we all reveled in my experience, the captain chuckled at our giddiness and my bravado. He began by describing the animal to the tee, including the blue gray body and spots and then proceeded to inform me that it was the pacific electric ray, an animal capable of discharging a kilowatt in 45 volt bursts, or roughly twice the current of an electric breaker. The captain knew someone who had been attacked by one, who had wrapped its underside around the head, and delivered the stunning charge. The 6’4, 300 pound behemoth described it as being hit in the head with a bat.

The official word from the Florida Museum of Natural History is that:

Divers are warned to avoid contact with the ray, as the shock of 45 volts or more is powerful enough to knock down an adult human. The Pacific electric ray is very confrontational and if harassed, will swim directly at divers. There are no confirmed mortalities from this ray, but there are some unexplained scuba fatalities in which this ray might have played a part.

If a great white or tiger shark takes too much interest in you, they say you should swim towards it, not away from it, indicating a lack of fear. In the wild, that will scare an animal, because it doesn’t know what you are and what your confidence indicates. Next time, perhaps I should take the same advice when an animal seems so unafraid of me …

Instructional Videos on the Web

2007-12-07T06:52:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting follow up to the original piece by Kansas State professor Jon Burg describing how the web changes information. It also shows the value of video to captivate and communicate key ideas. Video instruction over the web I predict will become a huge market. Already pitching some ideas to people for niche market segments. Where is expertise hard to find? What instructional videos would you watch? Knitting? Tae Kwon Do? Open Heart Surgery? The opportunities are endless. And the imagination for how to convey ideas over video are as well.

If you can't see this, try clicking on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyA

God is Not Great: Book Review and Rant

2007-12-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

I recently finished Christopher Hitchens' new book God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything and I thought it was reaffirming, although it got a little bit repetitive in the end. How many examples of the absurdity of religion are necessary to prove the point? How many examples of religious intolerance does it take to sway the tide? I guess for others it might require more argument, but I was bought in from the get go.

Unfortunately, what the book does not do is pave a way for creating a more agnostic society or more importantly a tolerant society. Hitchens is the serial contrarian, not the reformist. How do you fight for a non-idea vs. a bad idea? Kind of like the democrats vs republicans in the past 4 years, although recently the democratic debate borders on substance.

How do you preach such a simple concept of inclusion and objectivity when fanatical charmers are wooing followers by the thousands, dominating the educational system in areas, and commanding communication. How do you stand up and say "I don’t know what I believe but you are not right,” and make that a battle cry? (the not right being about intolerance not faith, although frankly ...).

I think a lot will be about changing the semantics of arguments. Evolution is a “scientific theory” which is the equivalent in natural English of a “law.” No one would argue with the law of gravity. What about the law of evolution? What if we could extend hate crimes bill to people who are targeted for lacking faith? What else can we do? The estate tax didn’t get repealed until it was relabeled the “death tax.” How do we change the language to make it more difficult? Intelligent design is not an “alternative scientific theory” just a “theory” like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but somehow we are losing this debate, and badly, I might add. If we can’t win one with such weighty evidence (they just found one of the highly publicized missing links in a glacier in Canada), how can we win at all?

When can we return to the age of reason? Was that an illusion too? All I know is I am getting pretty aggravated with the level of idealogical violence in the world today. God forbid you let kids name a Teddy Bear Muhammed or publish a cartoon or ... or ... or ...

Living in the Lap of Luxury

2007-11-05T16:42:00.000-08:00

I never even thought about that term "lap of luxury" until now. Living in the lap ... I guess it's about being protected, comforted, and enabled by a greater being or force. More to think about later.

But I write this because today I ate a $40 salad and tried on a $45K Hermes overcoat. Mink on the inside. And some special, rarer than cashmere wool that is made from just the necks of baby sheep. Then again, there is Astrakhan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrakhan_(fur) ) which is from the fur of aborted baby lambs. What a sick world we live in as we ski down the bell curve of scarcity and luxury ...

What do you use, consume, or depend on that is really is sad in the greater scheme of things?

I Believe I Can Fly

2007-10-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

No, no R. Kelly. Sit down. This is for real. For the first time, I can see it working. I am dying to get one of these outfits and get going. No, mom, not that level of dying. Check this out!!!

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/868917/flying_human_trickspro_com_wingsuite/

Flying Human TricksPRO.com - Wingsuite - The funniest videos clips are here

Learning not to Care

2007-10-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

There are things in this world that we just cannot change. Learning to accept that fact is harder than just writing it on this page or acknowledging its intrinsic obviousness.

It is in my own nature to control or affect a situation that causes me concern. But far too often that is not very realistic. The state of our political environment makes my heart drop. How do you start addressing the wonton and systematic disregard for the truth in the new era of political market messaging driven by capitalism rather than democracy? Is it any surprise that so many feel disenfranchised? They are. When candidates like Hilary Clinton raise $27M in a quarter, how many votes does that buy?

I work in marketing where terms like buyer persona research and campaign ROIs determine success or failure of companies. In the end, you think about the cost of customer acquisition. These are the same in politics but they are polling and budget allocation and I’d bet that campaign managers know exactly how many votes (electoral or otherwise) $27M can buy. It’s all very sad. For most, it is much easier to give up on an external system whose participation is optional. But what about things that are much more close, personal, and frequent?

How do you watch a close friend go down an inevitable path of addiction, alienating their friends to protect their habit? How do you admit that they are all too successful in making it too painful to help? How do you admit that you will ultimately only be ineffectual? How do you be there and not? How do you offer to help and know that you can’t?

How do you watch an organization go down a path of destruction that systematically alienates the people with whom you have built close ties from serving in the trenches over long days and nights? How do you spend years fighting for something that you now realize is beyond your control?

At a certain point, you have to stop caring to survive. But what does that mean? What are you trading off for happiness or dignity? Are you turning your back on love? Are you giving up the idealism that leads to great ideas? Are you abandoning the persistence that achieves the most impossible of dreams? Is it survival? Does it get easier and easier over time to let resistance overcome us? Is this aging and maturing or dying?

Part of me hopes to God I learn how not to care. Part of me trembles at the fact that I might be.

Angst, Aged 30 Years

2007-09-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Meredith sent me this story and it seemed to capture my current angst. Barlow's suggestions for adjusting the mindset could be more expansive, but self-awareness is probably a first step. I know several people who could use this read, so I thought I would share.

Tribal Workers

Today's generation of high-earning professionals maintain that their personal fulfilment comes from their jobs and the hours they work. They should grow up, says Thomas Barlow.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited

A friend of mine recently met a young American woman who was studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. She already had two degrees from top US universities, had worked as a lawyer and as a social worker in the US, and somewhere along the way had acquired a black belt in kung fu. Now, however, her course at Oxford was coming to an end and she was thoroughly angst-ridden about what to do next.
Her problem was no ordinary one.
She couldn't decide whether she should make a lot of money as a corporate lawyer/management consultant, devote herself to charity work helping battered wives in disadvantaged Communities, or go to Hollywood to work as a stunt double in kung fu films. What most struck my friend was not the disparity of this woman's choices, but the earnestness and bad grace with which she ruminated on them. It was almost as though she begrudged her own talents, Opportunities and freedom - as though the world had treated her unkindly by forcing her to make such a hard choice.
Her case is symptomatic of our times. In recent years, there has grown up a culture of discontent among the highly educated young something that seems to flare up, especially, when people reach their late 20s and early 30s. It arises not from frustration caused by lack of opportunity, as may have been true in the past, but from an excess of possibilities.
Most theories of adult developmental psychology have a special category for those in their late 20s and early 30s.
Whereas the early to mid-20s are seen as a time to establish one's mode of living, the late 20s to early 30s are often considered a period of reappraisal. In a society where people marry and have children young, where financial burdens accumulate early, and where job markets are inflexible, such appraisals may not last long. But when people manage to remain free of financial or family burdens, and where the perceived opportunities for alternative careers are many, the reappraisal is likely to be strong.
Among no social group is this more true than the modern, International, professional elite: that tribe of young bankers, lawyers, consultants and managers for whom financial, familial, personal, corporate and (increasingly) national ties have become irrelevant. Often they grew up in one country, were educated in another, and are now working in a third.
They are independent, well paid, and enriched by experiences that many of their parents could only dream of. Yet, by their late 20s, many carry a sense of disappointment: that for all their opportunities, freedoms and achievements, life has not delivered quite what they had hoped. At the heart of this disillusionment lies a new attitude towards work.
The idea has grown up, in recent years, that work should not be just a means to an end a way to make money, support a family, or gain social prestige but should provide a rich and fulfilling experience in and of itself. Jobs are no longer just jobs; they are lifestyle options. Recruiters at financial companies, consultancies and law firms have promoted this conception of work. Job advertisements promise challenge, wide experiences, opportunities for travel and relentless personal development.
Michael is a 33-year-old management consultant who has bought into this vision of late-20th century work. Intelligent and well-educated - with three degrees, including a doctorate - he works in Munich, and has a "stable, long-distance relationship" with a woman living in California. He takes 140 flights a year and works an average of 80 hours a week. Some weeks he works more than 100 hours.
When asked if he likes his job, he will say: "I enjoy what I'm doing in terms of the intellectual challenges." Although he earns a lot, he doesn't spend much. He rents a small apartment, though he is rarely there, and has accumulated very few possessions. He justifies the long hours not in terms of wealth-acquisition, but solely as part of a "learning experience".
This attitude to work has several interesting implications, mostly to do with the shifting balance between work and non-work, employment and leisure. Because fulfilling and engrossing work - the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience - often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.
Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don't contain enough hours.
Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: "Isn't this great? This is when I really love my job." What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. "It's as though he was validated, or making his life important by this," she says.
Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself - and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked - people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
Michael, the management consultant, is a good example of this phenomenon. He is prepared to trade (his word) not just goods and time for the experience afforded by his work, but also a substantial measure of commitment in his personal relationships. In a few months, he is being transferred to San Francisco, where he will move in with his girlfriend. But he's not sure that living the same house is actually going to change the amount of time he spends on his relationship. "Once I move over, my time involvement on my relationship will not change significantly. My job takes up most of my time and pretty much dominates what I do, when, where and how I do it," he says. Moreover, the reluctance to commit time to a relationship because they are learning so much, and having such an intense and fulfilling time at work is compounded, for some young professionals, by a reluctance to have a long-term relationship at all.
Today, by the time someone reaches 30, they could easily have had three or four jobs in as many different cities - which is not, as it is often portrayed, a function of an insecure global job-market, but of choice. Robert is 30 years old. He has three degrees and has worked on three continents. He is currently working for the United Nations in Geneva. For him, the most significant deterrent when deciding whether to enter into a relationship is the likely transient nature of the rest of his life. "What is the point in investing all this emotional energy and exposing myself in a relationship, if I am leaving in two months, or if I do not know what I am doing next year?" he says.
Such is the character of the modern, international professional, at least throughout his or her 20s. Spare time, goods and relationships, these are all willingly traded for the exigencies of work. Nothing is valued so highly as accumulated experience. Nothing is neglected so much as commitment. With this work ethic - or perhaps one should call it a "professional development ethic" - becoming so powerful, the globally mobile generation now in its late 20s and early 30s has garnered considerable professional success. At what point, though, does the experience-seeking end?
Kathryn is a successful American academic, 29, who bucked the trend of her generation: she recently turned her life round for someone else. She moved to the UK, specifically, to be with a man, a decision that she says few of her contemporaries understood. "We're not meant to say: 'I made this decision for this person. Today, you're meant to do things for yourself. If you're willing to make sacrifices for others - especially if you're a woman - that's seen as a kind of weakness. I wonder, though, is doing things for yourself really empowerment, or is liberty a kind of trap?" she says.
For many, it is a trap that is difficult to break out of, not least because they are so caught up in a culture of professional development. And spoilt for choice, some like the American Rhodes Scholar no doubt become paralysed by their opportunities, unable to do much else in their lives, because they are so determined not to let a single one of their chances slip. If that means minimal personal commitments well into their 30s, so be it. "Loneliness is better than boredom" is Jane's philosophy.
And, although she knows "a lot of professional single women who would give it all up if they met a rich man to marry", she remains far more concerned herself about finding fulfillment at work. "I am constantly questioning whether I am doing the right thing here," she says. "There's an eternal search for a more challenging and satisfying option, a better lifestyle. You always feel you're not doing the right thing always feel as if you should be striving for another goal," she says.
Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could "do anything", "be anything". It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.
The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.
Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited

Create a Bold New World for Yourself

2007-09-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

So much has happened, why I haven't I blogged? Maybe too overwhelmed with everything going on ... maybe blinded. When you come back from vacation, especially spectacular vacations, it makes you day dream. When you spend your days snorkeling with whale sharks, climbing famous mountains on camels, and touching biblical burning bushes, it makes you wonder why you spend so much of your time doing other things.

Money. Sure. Fame. Definitely. Pre-programmed desires that enforce a culture?

As I watch my European counterparts take 2 weeks of vacation at a time, several times a year, I wonder to myself, why do I live in the US? When you watch 47,000 people create collectively in a free environment that lacks any sense of money or self-promotion you might wonder whether your stock account is worth it.

I continually am reminded about Dan Pink's "A Whole New Mind." We all need to focus more on what we create to be truly happy. For me, I think I am going to start working on the cooking class I have wanted to teach for almost a year now and have made limited strides in putting together.

This is my line in the sand on procrastinating on my creation ...

If you don't hear more, call me out.

The Untethered and Wireless Oxymoron

2007-08-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

A lot of technology analysts have talked about the "untethered internet," which is to say that with mobile devices you can have the Internet anywhere, without a physical tie to the network. Remember tether ball? The reality is it is all a big lie. Because we have become so dependent on our mobile phones, we are now more dependent on being connected than ever, as I learned this weekend while my phone was dead. I was completely dysfunctional, carrying scraps of paper with phone numbers around and $5 in quarters running to find pay phones which no longer exist because everyone has a mobile phone. I never felt so lost without my tether. I went fetal.

Of course wireless is the other big oxymoron. With every new wireless device (phone, PDA, iPod, etc.) I have to carry more and more specialty wires with me. Why not just one wire? The USB 2.0 cable! With a USB dock you could plug anything in at any time in any region. Well, then everytime you lost your charger you wouldn't have to shell out $39.99 for a charger that literally costs less than $0.20 to manufacture. It's just a way to get more revenue out of you.

So I now I sit here with a jungle of 5 different wires in my laptop bag, completely dependent on the tether to my network thinking about all the promises of freedom in an untethered world. Seems like a sham to me.

Here have some wireless crack. It will free your mind. I promise.

The Monumental Collective

2007-08-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

Check out this amazing video of the North Korean Mass games.

Watching this video of Korean cooperation shows the power of the human collective, working together in unison. The sheer amount of energy, time, and coordination required boggles the mind. If we could coordinate like this by the tens of thousands, what else could we do? We could raise awareness for virtually anything. We could change government policies or reverse elections. We could build monuments. We could be monuments.

A lot of new technology out there is about harnessing the power of the collective. Wikipedia is the obvious example. But check out sites like Kiva which enables people like me to becom micro-lenders for people in 3rd world countries. And then there are of course all the social networking sites, which to a large extent have been a practical distraction, but I would argue hasn't reached its full portential and lent itself to the betterment of the world ... yet.

What can you organize to do? What are you being organized to do? The North Koreans organize for show. Now if they could only organize for peace or agriculture.

Faith and Love II: Actions Are Louder Than Feelings

2007-08-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

I spent a lazy Saturday afternoon in bed and watched a bunch of movies, one of which was The Last Kiss, with Zach Braff, whom I love from Scrubs and Garden State (though I here he is an a-hole in person). But hey, sometimes you can fake things outwardly but it is hard to hide who you are inside. And sometimes it is the other way around. Sometimes it's easy to fake who you are inside and hard to fake it outwardly. Let me explain.

There was an interesting rebuke of Zach Braff's character in the movie when he is caught cheating on his pregnant girlfriend and he proclaims his love for forgiveness:

"Stop talking about love. Every asshole in the world says he loves somebody. It means nothing. It still doesn't mean anything. What you feel only matters to you. It's what you do to the people you say you love, that's what matters. It's the only thing that counts. "

In light of recent posts and actions, this somehow was especially poignant to me. It's easy to internalize feelings, shape them, touch them, and let them distort your vision of actions past and planned. But all that really matters is what you do and the effect on the ones you love. And it is here, I probably get mixed grades. Of course all relationships involve you and others, so you can't take all failures on the chin.

I think this same premise follows for your faith. I care less about what your faith is and more how it affects others. So I find it difficult to call Islam a religion of peace, when fanatics strap bombs to themselves and kill civilians in the name of Allah. Similarly, I find the Christians are un-Christianly when they condemn gays and single mothers, and the Pope declares other religions as "defective."

Your faith should be like your love. What does it bring to those around you? What is the effect of your love in people and in God? Do you use love as a lever or as a lens?

My Perceived Anonymity

2007-07-26T21:24:00.000-07:00

This blog is dangerous. If you ask my mom, really dangerous. We were talking about one of my more personal entries and she asked, "What if decision makers read this blog?" Who are these decision makers, mom? If you are out there please respond so I know to censor myself. What bad things could happen? It seems a bit silly ... at first.

Talking to my good friend Simon, he mentioned that it was what he most admired about my blog, my openness and honesty. I was really opening others up to my innermost feelings, questions, and challenges. One person even remarked that they learned more about me from my blog posts than from talking to me directly. And I think that is quite accurate. Would I really publicly talk about fireflies and why they represent my ability to appreciate the meaningful things around me? Would I really open up that perhaps we are not designed to be happy but to be continuously driven by an unrelenting desire to strive for more? Maybe.

This blog for me is my diary in many ways. I have this perceived anonymity as I type these words. They are just words on a computer. They exist on a white background, nothing else. I am not going to document every twist and turn in life, I wouldn’t find that interesting, and I am also unable to fully suspend my disbelief. But my innermost thoughts and feelings are in here, and thus they are subject to the rollercoaster of my life. And it isn't all pretty.

And so mom was right. This blog can be dangerous, if I write in the wrong state of mind or am not thoughtful about what I say or accurately represent myself. Not everything you read is a perfect reflection of me. These are all snapshots in time and state.

Right now, I feel cautious as I write on…

Blind Faith Leading the Blind

2007-07-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

I almost hate to pick on the Pope because it so easy. The robe. The funny hat. The ridiculous car. That stuff is easy, and so is picking on his idealogy. The Pope this week demonstrated yet again why blind faith can be so dangerous.

In a decision to overturn the 1960's reform into the modern era of the Catholic Church, the Pope reinstated the old rules. The old, old rules. Without getting into too much detail, he called all other orthodox churches "defective" and Christian churches not "true churches." Defective? That's just mean. And intolerant. And ignorant. And this is where fanatical religions and their figure heads become farsical.

Where is the "love thy neighbor" in continuous, unscrupulous condemnation? Where is the good samaritan figure giving shelter and food to the helpless? Actually, the Catholic church did just pay $660 Million to the helpless - the sexually abused little boys in California that they molested. Who among you is asking how the Catholic Church had a half of a BILLION dollars to spare? For just California? For one lawsuit ...

My older sister sent me a prayer a couple months back. And part of it was a recital of the fact that my love is petty and meaningless without God. At a certain point, you have to say "how dare you?" I have had meaningful love. And while I am struggling to find meaning in life, I don't force strict rules on others in their paths. Except when they become intolerant. What if I called you defective or meaningless or petty?

My friend Kristen. Religious. Tolerant. Wonderful. The Pope? Not so much. With leaders like this, is it any wonder that we continue to experience the polarization of beliefs? That religious wars and fanatics rage on? That there are genocides. What are the Muslims supposed to think about the Pope's request for "honest and open dialogue" when he condems people that for a large part believe the same things he does, like Jesus being the son of God?

Is this dialogue really making our world better? Aren't the fanatics from the Taliban to the Evangelicals the ones perverting their own faiths? Aren't they the ones that are being defective?

Kristen has faith. She sees everyone else around her, their beliefs, and is respectful. She makes the world a better place. The Pope is letting his blind faith blind others and it pains me to watch.

I think it is time we all see the light.

Fireflies, Tourists and Poverty

2007-07-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was walking through Tompkins Square Park and I saw my first firefly of the season. It made me smile and think of childish days, of chasing after fireflies in the night with my sister. It was vivid. And then I noticed the trees and all the leaves, the wet smell of the dirt, the flowers that had bloomed but were sagging under the absorbed water weight. And then I saw a man sleeping on a wet park bench. I am not sure I would have seen, I mean really seen, any of these things without the firefly.

I really love to travel. To see new things. New cultures. New adventures. Perhaps that is why my Mom thinks I am insane. I am going scuba diving in Antartica. Pretty crazy, but there are fireflies under that ice and I want to capture them in my mental jar. And tourism is wonderful because you look at everything with new eyes. Like a child. Everything is slightly different, strange, and strangely insightful. Your brain recognizes new patterns, has more to process, and it can be captivating. The trick is to get more than a cursory view, but to actually emerse yourself enough to see what really is going on.

As I walked through the park last night, I had long ago stopped seeing New York City with tourist eyes. I had long ago taken for granted Tompkins Square Park and the homeless people around me. And all at once, the firefly ignited a great sense of urgency, of fear even, that I am missing it. That I am walking past life, not through it. And so I am going to take a more active look around and explore. It is too easy to take things for granted and forget about the serious things, the things that bring meaning to our lives. Sometimes you need a tiny light in the dark to wake you up.

Love: Because I Got to Have Faith, Faith, Faith

2007-07-06T09:14:00.000-07:00

Love is a funny thing. What an understatement! I have spent a lot of time thinking about love recently with the recent turbulent state of my love life. I have always dated wonderful girls. The last couple girlfriends have been an A-list fashion stylist, a woman who runs cancer research trials internationally, the NY Times Teacher of the Year, and a leading HIV researcher and published author. One might conclude I have been doing well. In some ways I have.

But as I look back, almost definitively there was a point where I decided that they weren’t the one. I had lost faith in the viability of the relationship. For one, it was a ridiculous public display when she misheard me. For another it was long distance. For another, it was a hormone induced fit that I hoped was atypical, but lasted far too long. For another, it was an insatiable insecurity.

Now you might think that I ended the relationship there. But I never was that smart or that ready to part. I thought I was “giving it a chance”. Instead, I was slowly pulling away, even joking near the end of the “Trevor soft landing approach”. (Full disclosure: the last one was crash and burn). Because I had lost faith in the person and in the proverbial “us,” I had started looking for faults. And we all have them. God knows I am difficult to deal with. But each fault became a way to reinforce the conclusion that I had already come to. And even worse, as I pull away, they typically turn it on. The adage is very true: “We run away from that which chases us, and chase that which runs away from us.” The more they would chase, the more I would pull away. The more guilty I would feel as they got more caught up and I got less. The less I enjoyed their company. The more I would pull away. The more they would chase ...

They say that relationships take work, constant care and feeding. Perhaps if I had more faith in the possibility of a positive end state (how romantic are those sterile words?) I would have made greater efforts. Perhaps if I had a better outlook, I would have overlooked the trivial things that really didn’t matter. And perhaps, I would have stayed or fallen in love.

Faith in its own way becomes a foregone conclusion. It is well documented the way people distort facts to support pre-existing beliefs. Is finding the “one” about admitting that I could settle down and live the rest of my life with someone? Is it about admitting that I could care enough about someone whom I couldn’t spend the rest of my life without? That’s my brother’s definition of love. I would like to say I truly believe in it. I am witnessing it this weekend as I perform a wedding for two of my friends. But maybe my biggest obstacle is my perceived fierce independence and invulnerability, which manifests itself not surprisingly as invulnerability through fierce independence. I create that barrier.

One of these girls recently mentioned to me that the only obstacles in a relationship are the ones we make. It’s the ones we choose to believe in. Faith can be a choice. Sometimes a blind choice. But those choices may close, or just as easily, open you up to love.

Now if faith only came that easy …

Fourth Beautiful, Fourth Spacious Skies ...

2007-07-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

Another distraction from my introspection on faith. But it is a goodie. Last night we threw a 4th of July party. If you weren't in the Hamptons, partying in the heart of "Merica," you probably were there. We had DJs, powered amps and speakers, a 60 square foot kiddie pool, and beautiful fireworks. The scene was, well picturesque. So picturesque in fact, that a photo of our party is on the front page of today's New York Times Metro Section. Simply awesome! Next year, the cover of Newsweek!

I Shit You Not

2007-07-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

I know I am supposed to be waxing poetic about faith this week, but I was in the elevator at work watching the Captivate network and nearly pissed myself when I read the following story:

"5 Die in Virginia Dairy Farm from Methane Emissions in Manure Pit."

Last words? "Holy Shit?" Ahh, those wacky Mennonites ...

Here is the story and the link:

Five dead in Virginia farming accident
HARRISONBURG, Va. (AP) - Tragedy on a Virginia dairy farm, as four members of a Mennonite family died trying to rescue a farmhand and each other from a manure pit.
Rockingham County authorities say five people in all were killed by methane gas emanating from the pit.
The sheriff says emergency workers speculate that each of the victims climbed into the pit in a frantic attempt to rescue the others.
The victims included a couple and 2 of their daughters, ages nine and eleven.
Methane gas is a byproduct of liquefied manure.

The Secret - Faith for Faith's Sake

2007-07-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of buzz about The Secret. A book, a movie, a movement. The essence of The Secret is that if you want to control the outcome of a situation you visualize it, actually feel that success emotionally, and that creates an energetic vibration with the universe that makes it happen. So if I am looking for a parking spot near my apartment, I should visualize it; feel the success of parking right in front of my building, getting out of the car and giving myself a high five; and auto-magically the parking space would appear. Perception becomes reality.

As a science geek, I found the scientific explanation to be lacking, though there are some interesting, though shallow discussions about energy and vibration. But what about the theory itself. I decided to give it a whirl. About a month back I decided to start using The Secret (sorry it begs to be underlined). I actively used it at a club, actually saying to myself “Use the Secret”. I focused on winning the Grey Goose bottle service raffle, believed in my heart that I had already won, and voila, I won! Since then I have gotten mixed results. Some eyebrow-raisers. I can’t say there have been uncanny coincidences. But I haven’t been hit by a truck either.

Cynics would argue that I am not really suspending my disbelief and hence not truly harnessing the power of The Secret. That’s probably a bit true. But that is also why it is such a questionable technique. It’s simple and dangerous: If you have faith in the outcome it will happen. If it didn’t it was because you didn’t have faith. How can your argue logically with that?

What a brilliant idea. All you need to do is imagine and it will happen. What an easy concept to sell to people who want more for themselves. It feels so much like a scam, but the problem is that it has a lot of basis in truth.

There have been several interesting studies done where teachers were told the smart kids were the slower kids and the slower kids were the smart ones. The result was that the "slower kids" started doing better on the tests than the "smart kids." Just by treating someone a certain way, or believing they are a certain way, makes them become that way. This makes the classification of the kids as slow or smart not something intrinsic but transient, and questionably accurate at all.

Visualization techniques are common in sports. In one case, a weightlifter who had maxed out at about 400 lbs was asked to do some visualization techniques. Less than an hour later, he lifted 500lbs for the first time. All he needed was faith in the ability to do it.

So in the first example, it was a mistake. Believing the wrong thing, made slower kids smarter. In the second, faith and visualization was used intentionally to achieve a specific goal. What if you did both? What if you intentionally believed in something you knew was wrong, but it was what you wanted? Could you manifest the seemingly impossible? Is the reason that you are where you are because of what you believe, whether right or wrong?

Could you make your life better by believing in the right wrong things? Maybe. Try it …

Finding a Balance and Finding Faith

2007-06-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

There’s little secret that I have recently been struggling with my work-life balance. Hence the absence of the blog for the past couple months. It’s gone a bit too far. I understand that. But I had faith in what I was doing, about how I could help my company, and what I could learn in an exciting opportunity. And I look back with joy and regret. ‘

My brother and I were talking about happiness in a fishing boat on a beautiful day this spring. And he mentioned that the joy and fulfillment of one’s life rests on several pillars: work, love, friends and family, community, and god. He pointed out that I was lacking several key pillars. But the one that most eluded me was god. And my struggle there has always been with faith.

Faith. It can lead to good and evil. It can lead and mislead. What is faith? Well an online dictionary gives us two important distinctions:
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence

The more interesting definition is the latter, when faith lacks evidence or logic. But of course it is a sliding scale. How much evidence is definitive evidence? When does a logical conclusion turn into an educated guess into faith and then blind faith itself? The next week or two, I want to examine faith. It turns out that all the pillars depend on it and that sometimes faith in something wrong turns out to be right.

And even this man who resists faith has begun to discover that faith appears in some of the oddest of places. Perhaps I am a more than a man of the cloth, but a man of faith too… Are you?

MyVote, MyPrimary, MyPresident, MyWarfare

2007-04-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I have been gone for so bloody long. I am back ...

In a fascinating announcement, MySpace announced that it will hold a presidential primary one month before Super Tuesday, when roughly 20 states hold their primaries. Given that MySpace is bigger than any state, bigger than all of Mexico, what does this mean?

Of course it's not all that real. The primary holds no electoral power. It also isn't limited to Americans. Nor are there any checks to prevent me from voting numerous times over numerous accounts. So it is all brew ha ha. But is it?

MySpace gives a voice to the underrepresented, voters under 30. It engages them in a new way and puts their voting power into consideration in a way that might spark greater voter turn-out. I predict a significant increase in the 18-25 segment. How big could it be? 10%? 20%? maybe. It may still be a pitiful number with the increase. But it WILL influence the vote.

Secondly, it further forces candidates in the online arena. Blogs, videos, search engine marketing, sure. But more than that. Right now, Obama has 5x as many friends as Edwards, and 10x as Hilary. Obama also has inspired people to develop videos for YouTube. But extending out the Obama video example, what about search engine espionage? Just search for "incompetence" or "stupid leader" on Google and find George Bush.

The future based on the current state of affairs leads to information warfare that will make the Swiftboat organization look like Green Peace. With the Net's anonymity, there is no cost to nastiness, and the American people have a healthy apetite for scandal. Sure there are lines that you might cross that would offend us, but short of those few, you could just about say anything. Then again, based on the last election, most lines have already been crossed. But expect it to go further. Expect some outrage. Shouting. Finger pointing into the hazy abyss of the Internet. Nixon like gestures of innocence.

A war has begun. And an equilibrium will emerge after both parties go way too far. Where will the American people land? I don't know. But if history is a track record, I would buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

2007-03-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Feedback from my post on Why I Would Have an Eating Disorder if I Were a Woman pointed out two main things. First was how largely irrattional, sub-concious, and compulsive an eating disorder truly is. Perhaps I analysed too intellectually, and did not do a good enough job describing how deep a psychological disorder this is. Maybe it is less rational than I portrayed, although I had attempted to paint that the rational justification is just the first step in spreading the deep psychological roots. Layers, as per my previous posts.

The second piece of feedback was the prevalence of male eating disorders. This Washington Post article discusses a recent study confirming one quarter of cases of anorexia and bulimia are of men. And it appears on the rise.

I think both the irrational compulsion and male comments are highlighted by this quote from the article:

"Some men have suffered from all three. Among them is Matt Gaebel, 22, who was hospitalized for anorexia during his sophomore year at North Carolina State University after his weight plummeted from 155 to 106 pounds. Gabel, who is 6 feet 3 inches tall, said he subsequently developed bulimia to cope with the weight he gained during treatment for anorexia, then turned to binge eating out of concern that self-induced vomiting would ruin his teeth."

You almost want to laugh, if it weren't so sad ...

Fear of a Brown Planet

2007-03-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, my sister won an award for the Nashville young leader of the year by helping out underprivileged kids who were mostly minorities. Recently she has been working on an inclusion policy (racial friendliness) and fighting legislation to require English at the workplace. She relayed to me how much people in Nashville fear the fact the world is getting browner. In Nashville as well as America as a whole, Hispanics are the fastest growing segment of the population, other than it seems, Reality TV contestants. As a native New Yorker, I like to see myself as open minded, unbiased, inclusionary, tolerant, yada, yada, yada. But you have to be careful in the way the fear machine seeps in.

Because of a late reservation for my last trip to London, the only affordable ticket was on Air India. Whether I liked it or not, there was an extra level of fear and anxiety that naturally crept in on the security line because everyone around me was, well, brown. Of course, I knew that Indians are different than Middle Easterners (though I justified some fear with the large Indian Muslim population). Nevertheless, I was shocked how much the not so subtle fear campaign of this administration has affected me.

That’s not to say that Indian people aren’t different. Much like the Chinese and I theorize other over-populated cultures which have people that have to fight fiercely for resources, the Indians in the airport were pushy in crowds. I always had someone leaning on me, from the back, from the side. When we boarded at the gate, the gate attendant had to call security because the crowd was pushing past her. She tried to hold them back, even raised her leg to brace the door. It was surreal, laughable even. Yes, Indians are a very pushy people.

But why should you believe me, when I write this? Am I not just another source of bias?

I believe many stereotypes are generally true. But you have to be careful about the ones you accept versus the ones you observe without bias. The fear machine is out there, and they are preying on us. And like a virus, they spread easily and muddy the water. And that's the worst brown planet of all.

I Am Not Ready to Make Nice ... Speeches

2007-02-13T16:02:00.000-08:00

I believe the Dixie Chicks did so well at the Grammy's in a large part because of the political statement they made and the sacrifices they endured. In the spotlight of the highest rated Grammy awards, the Dixie Chicks' win validated the importance of their messsage and their words just as quickly silenced that message into irrelevancy.

They were admittedly "speechless." Despite the $10,000s spent on dresses, jewelry, and make up, apparently they forgot arguably the most important part, what to do if they won. And as the Nelson-impersonating diva's snarky yell reverberated in the microphone, I laughed and then felt sorry for the helplessness that reminded me sadly of the Democratic party. In the triumphant moment, they simply had nothing to say. Perhaps they could have said:

This award means so much to us because of all we have endured because we dared to speak our minds on an issue which most Americans now agree with us. Through boycotts, record burning and death threats, we stand here to tell everyone that it is time to be more active not less, no matter what your position, and that it is time to listen and respect an open dialogue about the world we live in, shape, and sometimes destroy. We are not a nation of book or record burners. We are not embracing freedom by threatening the lives of those who speak against a popular view, either here or abroad. It humbles us to accept this award, because for us, this recognizes that we were not wrong to question or speak or mind, and perhaps our few words on stage, which became an arduous stand and a symbol, did more than shape the music world. Thank you.

But with all the opportunity, the Dixie Chicks didn't apparently consider what to do with the biggest microphone they would ever have. Where was the PR agent? Where were their hearts? Where is George Clooney when you need him? So sad ...

Why I Would Have an Eating Disorder if I Were a Woman

2007-02-06T16:53:00.000-08:00

Everyday I am reminded about the fundamental struggle of American women with their bodies and their image. And it’s not the Barbies, the Maxim covers, or the Weight Watchers commercials that I see. It’s the people I know and love. And as I and my friends get older, I see single women struggle with their beauty more and more, fighting an inevitable decline.

Nowhere is this more evident than in eating habits. Within almost every substantive interaction I have had with women over the past week, there has been one definitive comment about food: “I can’t order carbonara because I want to lose 10 lbs” or “I am sorry I am late to the movie. I am 4 lbs from my target weight and had to go across the street for frozen yogurt.”

Let me repeat. If I have spent 30 minutes with a woman in conversation, it has come up in some form. This is not a struggle that lies below the surface. Sadly, I have personal experiences with eating disorders, and I know, as contentious as some of you told me this sounds, that I would have an eating disorder if I were a woman.

Public Scrutiny

There is no doubt that society in its many incarnations puts immense pressure on women to be “beautiful” in whatever terms that word means. One issue is that the “beauty” expectation is unrealistic, which is obviously true given the number of augmentations done, the size of the diet industry, make-up, the exercise craze … you name it. Being beautiful is a multi-billion dollar business. And thus, so is creating the unreachable stereotype. It is not surprising that women feel like every time they leave the apartment they are being scrutinized. Maybe that’s why so many women like to wander around naked in their own home – it’s the one place they are free of scrutiny. At least external scrutiny. And truth be told, I am part of the problem.

I love women and I can’t help but look at them, idealize them, and analyze them. It is a natural instinct. I love the way a beautiful woman can attract your stare and turn your head, no matter what you are saying. I love pronounced hip bones, the pelvic lines that result, and following their visual lead. I love hip huggers. I love how a smile from a beautiful woman can change the momentum of your day on your commute to work. I love the smoothness of their skin, the shine in their hair, and the fashion of NY women designed exactly to captivate my attention.

Of course, I also look closely and note the imperfections, as does every guy. Words like cankles, spare tire, muffin top, butter, thunder-thighs, cottage cheese, sasquatch crotch, junk in the trunk, lights off, jumping on the grenade, etc. have come across my lips and almost every guy I know. Men are amazingly apt at observing and noting the imperfections in a woman, and just as apt at communicating them in cruel ways. It is not surprising that most girls are self-conscious. Perhaps they are just conscious. We as animals innately detect when we are being stared at. And yes, us men are staring.

I am no stranger to being stared at. Sometimes I invite it. Sometimes I have dreaded it, like when I went to Taiwan to the hot springs. When I got there, much to my surprise, every one was naked. I stripped at my locker turned around to find 40 Asian men all looking at the only white guy around for miles. It was so unnerving to be stared at from every angle, analyzed and measured, yet that is exactly the situation for women. And the only way I could be comfortable was in recalling the size stereotype as well as my perception of being healthy in that regard, and so my self-image put me at ease. But what if I were a girl? What would my self-image be like?

Self-image

Well, I am already ego-centric. That’s my euphemism to what some might call vain, others call cocky. I pride myself on who I am, what I stand for, and what I have accomplished. And part of that is because like everyone, these things were under attack for most of my life, especially my childhood. And I frankly made it through because of a healthy faith and belief in myself.

I was always one of the smallest boys in my class until Junior year. For boys that age, power is about strength and size, and I had neither. I was picked on quite often and I developed my own way to respond, with my wit, which at that unrefined time was really more obnoxiousness. Thank god it evolved, although the jury is still out according to some.

So undersized, how did I respond? I tried drinking a pint of ice cream a day. That caused growth in the wrong direction. A couple nights a week, John Chang and I practiced basketball drills and athletics in our basements for hours. Hours. That’s a little obsessive for a 7^th grader if you ask me.

To this day, my physicality some 20 years ago, has had a profound effect on the way I interact with people, why I keep them at arms length, why I shut down physical horse play definitively, why I play basketball like a madman, why I go to the gym, or used to before the latest job.

As a bit of an outcast, I didn’t have much of a love life in High School. No, that’s not accurate. I had no love life. So self-image very much plays a role in my love life too. I still strive to be higher in the hierarchy than I ever was growing up, and though it seems sad to say that, at least I can be open about it. In fact, how I appear socially, my outward image, has been a clear overemphasis in my life. Perhaps it is seeking approval that I lacked earlier, perhaps it is just natural. But with me, it is something that I have had to work on and struggle with.

So self-image, social acceptance and the social hierarchy, and my physicality have always been dominant issues in my life. These are the seeds of eating disorders and I assume would only be magnified if I were a girl. But what about food?

Food

For one, I love food. I think it is one of the most basic primal pleasures in your life. It is a fundamental drive built to the core of your DNA to seek out the sustenance you need to survive and procreate. I believe if you cook well, you will eat well for the rest of your life and that is an essential need for my happiness. As a result, I have taken cooking classes all over the world and plan to start teaching them myself in the next month or two.

I love to cook almost as much as I love to eat. And often foods high in calories and fat. French, Italian, Indian cream sauces. I drool at the mention of Il Mulino. New Orleans style food. Charred animal flesh in cream sauces. You can’t beat it. I believe butter is a beautiful thing.

My relationship with food can only be considered healthy in that I get enjoyment out of it and have little if any negative side effects (that I know about). Luckily I have had the metabolism to process my sizable intake. But what if I didn’t?

Control

Perhaps I would constantly go to the gym for my “health.” Disorders are often hide in euphemisms, in semantics we create to obscure the reality as much from ourselves as from others. I currently go to the gym for vanity more than health and can admit it. There I see women who clearly hate being there. They are willing to do distasteful things to control their image. You know who they are. You see them too. Do you notice them? I would be one of them. At points, I have been.

Eating disorders are a lot about control, or the illusion of it. And the gym provides a great way to create “control.” I consider myself a control freak, relishing being able to understand the world around me scientifically and exert such control based upon that understanding. If I see something is a negative influence in my life, I remove it decisively (at least I like to think so). If my struggle and goals were around weight and image then I would pride myself on my ability to control the outcome. It would become a challenge.

I don’t think I would become anorexic, because food is too central to me. I am sure I would cut back though. I already have. I would look to other forms of control. I would probably try Sugarbusters (I have), Atkins, and South Beach. I would study and understand them. It would change the way I view food, complex vs simple carbohydrates and glycogen levels, metabolic vitamins, etc. Actually I do that now. I would be able to tell you what’s in everything you eat, and I would secretly resent those who would order “impractical” things I wanted but “couldn’t” have because of my created science. I probably would be an insufferable dinner companion. Truly struggling women often are. I know women who generally won’t go out with others to eat. It’s a dreaded experience for everyone. Instead, I would probably hole up in my room.

After some time, eating might become distasteful, while food itself would become a tantalizing temptation. Maybe anorexia wouldn’t be that far fetched. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the illusion of control. I would resent the loss of such a frequent source of joy and then I would have my Dorian Gray moment. As Oscar Wilde describes, “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” And my weakness might be despicable, because it would be a personal affront to my controlling nature. My sense of self-worth would be at stake, self-loathing would ensue as it currently does when I feel I have lost control. And then, if I didn’t see what the real negative influence in my life is, I might get really creative.

Purging might seem reasonable, probably a bit farfetched. I would definitely use the word “purge” because it seems more banal. At least that’s what I would say to myself. I would make sure I digested something to convince myself I was healthy. I would have to do something about my breath and the acid. Vinegar rinses. Antacids. If I follow this path, I can imagine bulimia. And while the thought now seems so unlikely, the slow, steady decline makes it all seem so reasonable. There are a lot of steps down this path, and they are all downhill. The pressures are unwavering and it is a gradual distortion. I have watched as the building delusions reinforce themselves. I have found my way down that path in other situations and have watched people I respect go down this path themselves.

Conclusion

It’s hard for me not to read the last couple paragraphs and think to myself, “man, you are presumptuous bastard.” And I am, minus the bastard part I hope. I don’t really know what would happen. And maybe my depiction above is trite and just scratches the surface. I am sure it does. I can only begin to estimate an eating disorder which is so psychologically devastating. But I do know this:

“It is a formidable adversary who takes positions in your mind.”

And so I write this not to pretend that I know what it is like or to say I understand. I write simply to say that in our image obsessed country, the eating pathologies of single women are ubiquitous. And it pains me. And what saddens me is that I know I would be among you, and for this, perhaps you can forgive the presumptuousness of my writing above. Perhaps the real goal of this piece is to give me a greater ability for me to forgive others and myself by walking down the path. Maybe that was the real need, at least for me.

Filling Holes IV: Social Distortion

2007-02-05T06:51:00.000-08:00

As your brain works to augment your reality, change what you see, and change what you think about it, what role does social behavior play? In a fascinating experiment in the 1950s, Soloman Asche conducted a simple experiment where subjects were asked to match which of three lines matched the length of a fourth line. Simple right? Yeah. Almost all subjects got it right every time ... until they added people. They planted 7 other people in the room who acted like they were subjects, but intentionally identified the wrong line. What happened? Subjects would start guessing the wrong line 41% of the time!!! Wow.

The experiment was repeated last year with the new wonders of the MRI to diagnose what exactly was happening in the brain. Clearly the brain's forebrain which is designed to moderate conflict (in this case perception vs. social conformity) must be more active in this decision than the posterior brain which manages perception.

Actually not. Instead, scientists saw increased activity in the areas that affect mental rotation: the majority's choice affected the subject's perception. It's not that the brain made a choice between the two at higher levels of brain function. Instead, it actually changed the image in the subject's head at much lower levels. Thus 41% alteration.

So social norms, discussion, and pressuring can affect your perceived reality. It is an input to your brain in a vat, a la Descartes. And though your brain is well adapted for these functions developed specifically to help you survive (in this case there is a value to social conformity), it does create an illusion. And again, over time, the externally reinforced illusion is well, reinforcing itself, internally. And over time, this can create a delusion. Even brazilian models see mostly imperfections when they look at their idealized body. So many beautiful women I know describe how fat they are, even though they may be gorgeous. And while it is so hard for me to understand the delusion, the continuous social reinforcement and recent studies put clues into what is happening here. If outside opinion can extend or shorten a line, it probably is extending and shortening the lines of your body at the perception levels of the brain.

If you are looking in the mirror and thinking you look fat -It may not be that you are fat. It may not even be that you think your actual body is fat. You may just see fat. So when I respond after a self-deprecating comment by a girl, "Are you blind?" The answer just may well be "Yes."

Next time you look in the mirror, you may just wonder what you really are looking at.

Filling Holes Part III: Habit vs. Creativity

2007-02-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

So your brain keeps filling in the holes, solving problems in the way it has learned over time. Because the brain reinforces itself and strengthens it's model with every affirmation, over time habits become stronger, intertwined. That's why you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Or as posted in a nearby designers cubicle:

"The force of habit is the enemy of creative power."

It is more than simple habits. It is thought itself, your perception of reality, and it changes what you think actually happened. This is partly to blame for why it is possible to get many different accounts of exactly the same situation.

“Thoughts and memories are associatively linked, and again, random thoughts never really occur. Inputs in the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in the present, and auto-associatively link to what normally follows next. We call this chain of memories thought, and although its path is not deterministic, we are not fully in control of it either.” (On Intelligence, P75)

The repetitive programming of your brain starts determining the what next in more limited ways, even changing what you see (more on this in the next post). No wonder John Forbes Nash was so consumed by achieving mathematical greatness by 30. Is that when you grow up? Is it grow old? Maybe it is grow static.

I think that is why it is essential to live to continually challenge yourself in new ways. Find new adventures. Challenge your fears. Do something different everyday. Learn something out of your sweet spot. Challenge others.

Otherwise, you may be destined to perceive life as the same set of round holes, unable to see that you really posess a square peg.

Filling Holes Part II: Anti-social Behavior

2007-01-31T13:21:00.000-08:00

My brother called me to mention some of his favorite examples of filling in the holes. Sometimes it can be cool, like when you are driving by a picket fence with a horse behind it, you actually see the full horse. Your brain puts all the pieces together. Interestingly enough, you can toggle on and off, seeing the fence, then the horse, and then the fence again. But sometimes, we all have trouble turning it off, leading to some anti-social behavoir.

The brain is especially good at facial recognition. Its ability to assimilate an entire face from portions of it (like a nose and one eye) are unmatched by even the most powerful computers. Facial recognition is extremely important for your survival, so it is a core function. Of course, that is also why your brain fixates when it is wrong. Sometimes you can't help but stare at someone with a deformity, because your brain is trying to assimilate why it went so wrong and improve it's model. It's not your fault; it's human nature. Tell that to your mom.

I have always had trouble listening to slow speakers, because I know the next words. This often leads me to interrupt them by filling in the words myself. I remember Liz Topp describing once how annoying that was, and I actively worked on it. Now I just fill them in in my head. Then again this skill is useful. My brother describes a friend with ALS, who's speech degraded so that my brother couldn't understand a single word his friend said. But at the end of the sentence he could put all the pieces together to figure out the whole sentence.

For me, the most anti-social of behaviors is staring at the TV. Part of it is the motion, but a lot of it is the fact that you have blind spots in your peripheral vision, ie it can't process the image, especially one so detailed with motion. As a result your brain actively turns your eyes towards it. I can barely talk to my sister if there is a TV on in the room; she just stares at it. I have trouble focusing at meetings with video, which is tough when you are pitching Internet TV services. In the morning at my office building, it amazes me how every single elevator rider stares at the embedded TV screen. The name of the service? "Captivate Network."

Sometimes your brain captivates you with it's background job of filling in the holes. But be careful, because of the anti-social consequence you may find yourself in a hole of your own.

Filling in the Holes and Creating Them

2007-01-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting points in my recent foray into neurophysiology is the way in which the brain fills in patterns before they are actually received. As you read this right now, there is a gaping blind spot in each eye, a hole in the center of your field of vision. Close one eye. Can you see it? No, no you can't. Your eye moves a little every tenth of a second to compensate. Even then there still is a hole in the center, as well as general blindness in the far reaches of your peripheral vision. But if I look really closely with one eye open, I do detect something is going on.

The same is true for sounds. You actually process the notes of your favorite song before you hear them. If I hummed your favorite song, you would hear the next note, even if I stopped. If I said "he was a legend in his own ..." your brain actually processed the word "time" or my favorite alternative "mind." But I didn't have to write it for you to think it, and many times, you wouldn't even know.

Here is the interesting part: your brain fills in ambiguous information (like the blind spots, or gargled words) with known patterns, things it has learned. To be clear, you are not really seeing or hearing the real world. You hear what your brain thinks the real world is, based upon partial information and learned patterns that then deceive you into having a full view.

Now the ways in which your brain fools you into thinking you have a complete view are tremendously interesting. Sometimes it fills the holes in, sometimes it creates holes and pushes you in.

The subject of this week's posts will be exactly that: Filling in the Holes and Creating Them.

Where in the World is Trevor Sumner?

2007-01-26T03:50:00.000-08:00

The last 2 weeks have been a whirlwind tour in Los Angeles and London causing the longest post lapse in this blog. I know you all miss me terribly. I guess all I can recite is a quote that made me smile:

"Time is the thing that prevents everything from happening all at once. Lately, time hasn't been working."

My company is in an interesting state of transition with a new management team, and aggressive agenda, and I have recently been empowered to make some serious changes and build some cool technologies. And I have jumped right in.

Last night I pondered why I have poured so much of my heart and time into work. It isn't for the money, although I do hope that will come with time. And it isn't for the people because I have only just begun to build relationships with them, though that is an increasing part of it.

Instead, it's because I feel empowered to change this company and to produce new technologies that I can point to as mine. I am building a payment system that will process 10s of millions of dollars, designing a business information platform that will hopefully help define how media companies track their business in a new Internet world, and I am creating a YouTube like service that will be the basis of a content marketplace to come. And it is nucking futz how much has changed in a month and a half, for me and us.

And I wonder how much of this is me being a leader in search of a problem and an organization and how much of this is that there was a problem and organization in search of a leader. In the end, this is a question of fate and determinism, which I won't address now, but I do know this: I feel exhilirated about the opportunity ahead of me.

Thou Shalt Not Be a False God or a Mean One

2007-01-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

Pat Robertson continues to give Christians a bad name, as if the Church needed more help. He announced this week that "God told him" there would be a terrorist attack possibly killing millions. I want more info. Was it a burning bush, Pat? Voices in your head? Someone needs to lock this guy up in a padded room. What's scary is that there are millions of people who believe his every word. I remember something in the 10 commandments about false idols and bearing false witness. How can I know the Bible better? Then again, I think there must have been a commandment about thou shalt not steal. The NY Times this week reported that 87% of Catholic churches reported embezzlement in the past 5 years. Holy petty larsony, Batman.

So Pat Robertson is an idiot. No new news there. And Catholic priests aren't so holy. Again, not the biggest revelation, just ask Sen. Foley. But the 10 commandments. When is the last time you looked at them? I read the piece on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments) and I have to say, they sound a lot nicer in the simplified form than the actual scripture. The Exodus version is quite harsh, not exactly the God I was hoping for:

"I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me."

Gotcha. No wonder why many religions don't have humility (http://trevorsumner.blogspot.com/2006/09/its-time-for-little-humility.html). And if you don't like my take, I will strike you down, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your ... aww forget it. I am not that mean.

BTW, here is my favorite coverage of Wacky Pat: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=3&entry_id=12278

Thou Shalt Not Be a False God or a Mean One

2007-01-06T07:01:00.000-08:00

New Years Eve is

2007-01-02T16:03:00.000-08:00

Throwing together a New Year's party with one week's notice ...

Constructing a 600 square foot tent 7 stories above the ground to combat the wind and rain ...

Ordering an obscene amount of champagne and liquor ...

Inviting 500 people and getting 250 to come ...

and most importantly ... having 18 of your friends and family holed up in your small 10x12 bedroom, drinking, telling stories, and belting Bon Jovi.

Now that I am 30, maybe I am halfway there ...

I Got Friends When I'm In Low Places

2006-12-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

This week I learned to snowboard. Everyone told me the same thing. First day is not much fun. Second day is hell. Third day is when it starts to come together. Well, it was mostly true, but perhaps "hell" is an understatement.

Day 2, you start to try to do the right things, but you end up falling a lot, and in the Northeast, a lot on the ice. Even worse, you tend to fall on the same part of your body, over and over again. My left buttcheek shows off a grapefruit sized bruise with quarter sized black spots. And other than one time when I caught the front edge and I went from standing to a face plant in a moment that most seemed like a car crash, these bruises best represented my day.

And so, I headed into Day 3 with definitive dread. Every part of my body screamed at me. Every bit of my nature urged me to stop this madness. With a headache and a sore jaw (from hitting my helmeted head so hard it dislocated my jaw), hamstrings and calves too sore to touch, wrists that no longer could summon the fingers to clench, it was all too easy to head in. It was at that time that I could have most easily given up. I pictured it. Began convincing myself that I had accomplished enough. I was halfway down, yet already off the slopes. The psychological onslaught was intricate and comprehensive. There were more reasons to stop than continue, and the negativity reinforced itself in every fall.

And that was when my friend Mike, a great instructor, decided to take half a run with me. He instilled such confidence with a calm, assuring tone. He told me to try some techniques, but most importantly he told me that we would eventually try something that worked.

But then Mike had to go teach paying students and I was left to my mental self-defeat campaign, reinforced with every tumble as I cursed in multiple languages. And then my friend Lou committed to riding with me. And with every fall, I had so much more of an incentive to get up. Lou waited for me. I couldn't stay down for more than a moment. If just for perception, self or otherwise, I persevered. The equilibrium tipped, and I now had more reasons to keep going.

As a result of Mike and Lou, I finished Day 3 strong, cutting the slopes on both sides of the board and finishing with a sense of accomplishment. I still groan when I sit down, but the trip was a success because I couldn't do it alone and I didn't have to.

The Unending Pursuit of Happiness

2006-12-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

Disturbing quote from The Moral Animl that builds on my original post on Evolution is Too Damn Slow :

"We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals - sex, status, and so on - often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.)"

To make our species drive to betterment, happiness thus must be fleeting. Being unfulfilled is the motivation. At least I know that what I feel, is how I am supposed to feel. Maybe I can do a better job of resisting it, because I understand it. Which brings me to my last quote of the day:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria

What is your great battle? Hint: You are fighting it right now.

The Grass is Always Greener Somewhere in NYC

2006-12-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

I grew up in NYC and pride myself on having been molded in its high metabolism environment, where organized chaos rules, you see thousands of people each day, and you have to dodge traffic at every turn. In such a big city, anything is possible and everything is happening all at once. Whereas in Austin, I was prone to knowing I was in the coolest spot, but wishing for more diversity and options, NYC provides a source of a different type of malaise.

This was an interesting weekend for me. On Saturday I had two amazing events to go to. The first was Santacon where 600 people dress up as Santa and do a pub crawl while causing mayhem at various landmarks. Imagine 600 santas storming bryant park and mounting its statues or climbing firetrucks, or just the bar scene at a local Irish pub. It's organized mayhem and one of my favorite days of the year.

At the same time, I had a Chanukah party at one of my closest friends, where we reveled in our holiday spirit, spun the dreidel, and I became the Gimel king. It was fantastic. In the end, I did both Santacon and Chanukah, but I certainly missed out on the latter half of Santacon, where Santa's inhibition is washed away by everything from egg nog to tequila. And so it is in NYC, where there is always something fantastic happening, and probably some place better to be.

The secret to living in NYC, at least for me, is to make the most of your time, but also to be comfortable knowing you can't be at the best party even any of the time. There is simply too much going on. Cherish the time you have with the friends you have. And hey, it's better than living in Austin.

The Harder Pill to Swallow

2006-12-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

In response to my post on equality vs. evolutionary psychology, Mom Loves Me More: Why Violence and Not Marriage Proliferate in Harlem, my brother wrote me an interesting email:

"My younger brother wrote: 'Are we dealing with truth, regardless of the effect on stubborn notions of equality? Evolution is a scientific theory,not a moral judgement.'

Anything of value: say love, art, community, family, is built not onflickering truth, but on enduring belief."

Is understanding of value? And if so, what are the bases of our enduring beliefs? Could evolutionary psychology play a role in our belief in family, the notion of love? I think it does.

What fascinated me most about his point is the subtle conflict of belief and truth. Is a belief more valuable or more powerful the harder it is to explain and the less based in truth or provable fact? Does it galvinize its believers more?

Believing the obvious is easy. Investing, pursuing, or commiting to the subtle, the complex, the elusive, or even the farfetched builds a community.

What do you believe in that you can't prove? What about the farfetched? How does that belief affect who you are and who you are with?

Oh What a Wicked Web We Weave ...

2006-12-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

Now that everyone has agreed we are losing Iraq and people are realistically looking at the options, Jon Stewart's titling "Mess-O-Potamia" seems all the more apt. We are dealing with a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. The whole notion that Al Qaeda has much do with it is ridiculous doublespeak. They represent an estimated 2-3% of the "insurgency."

Shiites are well aligned with Iran, which is why we are engaging them now politically. The cost of this war is not just the half trillion dollars, the 3,000 american lives and 20,000 mamed (not to mention all those pesky Iraqis we killed and mamed), but a tremendous political loss. We now have engaged Iran and Syria to help us and have lost any leverage with them. Good luck on blocking the nuclear power plant now. We are literally pandering to the Axis of Evil (Syria should have been there). Maybe that's why George Bush always looks like he is about to throw a tantrum.

Now Saudi Arabia, a Sunni majority, is looking at what's unfolding and concluding the obvious, which is that the Sunni's in Iraq will get the short end of the stick in Iraq. And by short end, we are talking a military campaign of ethnic cleansing.

A Saudi contractor, Nawaf Obaid, who was consequently fired by the Prince Turki al-Faisal, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post outlining how far Saudi Arabia was willing to take it. By increasing oil production, they could half oil prices overnight and magnify Iran's economic woes and bring it to its knees. It's economic warfare between Saudi Arabia and Iran. One can only imagine what happens next. They are already summoning Sunni's to come to the aid of their brethren in Iraq. That's a nice way to say the army is mounting.

Sectarian violence is a joke of a term. We are finally agreeing that it truly is a civil war. But with Saudi Arabia and Iran being forced to jump in, this war could turn much bigger and much less civil. Hopefully, the diplomatic efforts of the US can navigate this tightrope walk. This administration's diplomatic track record speaks for itself...

At least Iran doesn't have the bomb ... yet.

Comments on the Blog

2006-12-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Please make sure to enter your name when you post a comment on the blog. Then I can respond back to you. Thanks to whomever for the evolution article. Which one of you was it?

Mom Loves Me More - Why Violence and not Marriage Proliferate in Harlem

2006-12-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

In my post titled Gay Marriage ... Not Again, I proclaimed that I don't care if a guy wants to marry a trash can. My brother responded that he did, and he cited the low marriage rates in Harlem as one of the causes of violence and poverty. Reading my new, intriguing book on evolutionary psychology, maybe there is another answer: that my mom loves me more. Let me explain.

If you believe in evolution, it's quite natural that evolution would affect more than size, height, or physical structure, but also innate behavior as well. All kinds of interesting hypotheses follow, on monogomy, love, friendship, and family as a means to advantageous strategies. Maybe this could explain Harlem.

In most species where the female bears the investment of childbearing, males can have many more children. As a result, females are more selective in choosing a mate and competition among males can be quite fierce. The result of this, and that males are evaluated for their ability to provide (money, status) whereas women are valued more for fitness (beauty), is that it is easier for women to marry up (or mate up) than men. A poor but beautiful woman is more likely to find a rich husband, than a poor, beautiful man finding a rich wife.

Now this logic has implications. If a poor mother had several children, then she should favor her daughters rather than her sons, because they are more likely to mate upwards. In short, the daughters have a better chance at proliferating their genes. The reverse is true of affluent mothers who should favor their sons. Wow, right? Is there any evidence?

Well Florida pack rat mothers when deprived of food (in poverty) will wean off their sons while continuing to feed their daughters. In many species, the birth rates are even affected such that impoverished mothers are more likely to produce daughters. But that's rats. What about humans? Every mother would resist this notion vehemently.

It turns out that impoverished mothers breast feed more than half of their daughters but less than half their sons. In affluent mothers, it is quite reversed: 90% of affluent sons, while only 60% of daughters. My jaw began to drop ...

Of course having more children causes greater competition. So if you were to protect a child by waiting to have another, you would expect a poor woman to wait longer after a daughter to protect her and affluent woman to wait longer after a son. That turns out to be true too: 4.3 years after a daughter vs. 3.5 after a son in poor families, and the opposite of 3.2 after a daughter and 3.5 years after a son in affluent mothers. The evidence is compelling.

So looking back at Harlem, maybe the poverty means that males were less cared for than females because of poverty. They were fed less, cared for less, and left to fend for themselves. Consequently, as impoverished males, their best mating strategy for gene proliferation is having many relationships since they have less to offer in male parental investment. Hence less marriage. And as it comes to violence, most violence in species is about establishing status as it relates to mating. So evolutionary psychology explains Harlem, the marriage rates, the polygamy, the violence.

And coming from a relatively affluent family, it also implies that mom more likely loved me more. Sorry sis. At least mom denies it ...

BTW, this book is a must read. Every 10 page section drops my jaw or challenges the most important ideas at their core. Simply, fascinating.

The Godfather Part 1

2006-12-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, my good friend Mike Ma and I were supposed to watch football at his house and he had to leave for several hours. Most importantly he left me with his 6 month old son, Sean (who by the way, is the cutest thing). I had never babysat before, let alone for a baby, but he wasn't really worried. For the first year of Sean's life, I was the only non-family member to take care of him. It was fun and easy.

At a dinner party a couple months later, this fact was revealed to a group, and the nearly unanimous response was: "You left him alone with TREVOR?!?" Most of the people knew me from my nights going out, as a fun loving, carefree guy. But Mike without hesitation reiterated his trust and in the process further solidified my friendship with him. It was as if the rest of the people at the table didn't really know me, and I was a bit saddened. Often times you find out who your friends are when there is a crisis, because you either help them, they help you, or they allow you to help them with something critical. In the absence of crisis who do you really trust, and who trusts you?

I guess this is also why I am so pleased, honored, and humbled that Uncle Arthur has named me the Godfather of his new baby boy. Please everyone feel free to email him. Contact me personally for his email address.

Business Balls and NYC Traffic

2006-11-29T12:53:00.000-08:00

It scares me a little when my mom drives in NYC because every other car is aggressive. My mom is a meek driver and doesn't protect her space in the lane. Inevitably, a car inches over and cuts her off, causing anxiety for my mom and usually anger from others that my mom lags behind. (OK, that might be me, but it happens to me when I see other meek drivers on the road).

We, in my current job, are so afraid of losing a customer who is having problems becoming self-sufficient that we are doing 10s of hours of content processing for them for free. Every week. No end in site. As a result, we are unhappy because of increased costs ($Ks) and they are unhappy because they are not self sufficient.

Instead, we should have said no and demand they process their own content or charge them a fee. This would have given them the incentive they needed to become self-sufficient.

Now we have an unhappy client and significant costs all because we don't have the marbles to draw reasonable lines with our clients. Clients, like NYC taxi cabs, will always inch for more. There is nothing wrong with accomodating them to keep going, but at a certain point you got to protect your space on the road if you want to get where you are going.

The "Ism" Stigma - Shutting down difference

2006-11-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

It can be quite scary to recognize difference in an idealistic society that believes in utopian ideals of equality. Yet difference is found everywhere in nature among species.

Take for example the Galapagos cactus. On islands with turtles (who eat the cactus) the cactuses grow taller, out of turtle reach. On the other islands, just miles away, the cactuses grow right off the ground. One simple evolutionary difference in environmental pressure over many generations changed the traits within a species. What a banal and simple point that most would accept.

Now, let's take on the same subject and make it completely objectionable. The African American male for several generations in a slavery society faced an increased pressure on physicality: size, endurance, and strength. The result is that after many generations, African American males are larger than their African counterparts, including first or second generation African Americans. WHOA!!! Now that's racist. Now let's talk about IQ ... just kidding. I wouldn't approach that topic but if evolutionary pressures affect height or strength ... Let the explosions begin, and maybe rightfully so.

The evolution card has been extended by Social Darwinists to lay claims about the fitness of races, and thus provoke racist notions of superiority justifying the subjugation or elimination of races. But take away any desire to suppress a race, as well as any generic notion of fitness, and lastly the notion that any generality is not specific to any individual. Are we dealing with truth, regardless of the effect on stubborn notions of equality? Evolution is a scientific theory, not a moral judgement.

If you look at natural history, evolution is racist. It is sexist. It is heightist. And it is fatist. In Galapagos turtles, it is even neckist. Could the differences between us draw a guide to past evolutionary pressures? If so, what do your differences say about your genetic history? What about the differences of others?

Sometimes the truth is a tight rope walk, especially with "isms". But equality is an illusion. So take that ideal and put it in your "ism."

Evolution is Too Damn Slow

2006-11-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

As I approach Thanksgiving and my much awaited post on "Why I Would Have an Eating Disorder if I Were a Girl," let's approach the subject by talking about evolution - of course.

I am reading a fascinating book (thanks, Meredith) on the role of evolution in our social behavior, The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright. For those of you struggling with the sexual roles and stereotypes of men and women, this is a great book. Wait, that's all of you ...

But instead of delving in just yet, I want to touch on the uneasiness I tend to feel about being content with my life. Often I feel like I am not accomplishing what I should be. I am not who I was meant to be. Intead of the grandiose dreams implanted in me from years of television, I am going to blame evolution, at least partly. Maybe evolution didn't design me right.

For example, our common "sweet tooth" is a remnant of times long past where fruits were hard to come by, yet nutritionally important. A sweet tooth was a positive incentive, now it is hazardous to our health. Our desire to eat rich, fatty foods similarly comes from a time when such foods were scarce, so the incentive led to better habits. Now it leads to heart disease, stroke, and obesity. Our natural instincts lead us to struggle against our current reality, and guess what, most people fail and many become miserable because of it.

And frankly I know that for the past million years my genes weren't being groomed and evolved to sit in a chair all day looking at this computer screen. Now my back and neck hurts, I have early signs of carpal tunnel, and I'll bet I won't be able to see well when I am 40, without glasses that is.

If it takes 5000 generations to turn a wolf into a chihuaha or under different pressures a Saint Bernard, how long is it going to take my genes to adjust to the new world? You can't kill all the undesirables like you could with dogs.

Maybe my fundamental unrest is because I am not designed for the 21st century, or the 21st century just ain't designed for me. Damn, that evolution. It's just too damn slow.

Too Full To Listen: Lessons in Timing

2006-11-09T02:53:00.000-08:00

Seth Godin, Internet Marketing God, writes a spot on article on timing, and why politicians have had to spend a shocking $2B on repetitive advertising just to get mindshare. He points out that we are all so overloaded with messaging that we are "full." At some point, just a moment, we become "unfull" and you have to be there at that moment, and you have to have been there before as a primer. "So, all marketing analyses that ignore time are wrong," he says.

I have seen this countless times with Internet marketing. Did you know that twice as many people will open your marketing email in the aftenoon then in the morning? If you get to work and have 30 new emails (aka you are full) you just delete. In the afternoon, after lunch, you ease back into work and look there is an email you might take a look at. Same is true Mondays and Fridays, versus during the week. The statistics are truly amazing.

So when you approach someone about something important, do you think about whether they are full at the moment? Wait until they are not full and leave the politicians to being full of it.

Bland Politicians

2006-11-07T15:34:00.000-08:00

Following my post on cookie cutter politicians ( http://trevorsumner.blogspot.com/2006/11/bush-and-kerry-are-right.html ) comes a NY Times op-ed piece by a Swarthmore psychology professor who wrote the book "Why More is Less." He explains the psychology of picking the less "bad" candidate rather than the better candidate. Well, I fear after this election, we will still have more of less.

Praying for numbers in London ...

When Righteous Just Ain't Right

2006-11-06T15:54:00.000-08:00

Remember when "confirmation" in religious circles didn't mean validating a case of homosexuality, pedophilia, or both? First Foley, now Haggard. Well, not "first" Foley. No, first the Catholic Church. No, no. First (insert "righteous" leader here). There is such a long line of "righteous" people doing terrible things, it gives good principles a bad name.

It is well accepted in psychology that those that are fiercely homophobic harbor homosexual tendencies. What does that say about our most "righteous" leaders. Time to connect the dots, America ...

Two Must Read Articles in NY Times

2006-11-05T15:51:00.000-08:00

I am too frustrated to document the expansive farce of this election, so there is always Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/opinion/05rich.html?em&ex=1162875600&en=ab14398cda28b94f&ei=5087%0A). Here is Rich's article since both require Times Select:

Throw the Truthiness Bums Out
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 5, 2006
EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, I’d go for Lynne Cheney’s pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. It’s not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a children’s book titled “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.”

The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheney’s authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, “Sisters,” with steamy sexual interludes suitable for “The L Word.”

When Mr. Blitzer brought up “Sisters” on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many “Sisters” passages floating around the Internet: “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” But you can’t have everything.
Even without Eve and Eve, this silly episode will stay with me as a representative sample of this election year. It wasn’t just that the entire Cheney-Blitzer-Webb-Allen fracas had nothing to do with the issues that confront the country. It was completely detached from reality. Mr. Allen, who has been caught on video in real life spewing a racial epithet, didn’t attack Mr. Webb for any actual bad behavior, but merely for the imaginary behavior of invented characters in a book. As if it weren’t enough for Mrs. Cheney to regurgitate Mr. Allen’s ludicrous argument, she fudged the contents of her own novel, further fictionalizing what was fiction to start with. Then she turned around and attacked CNN for broadcasting nonfiction — a k a news — like her husband’s endorsement of waterboarding in a widely disseminated radio interview.

The incessant shell game played with fiction and reality turned this episode of Mr. Blitzer’s program, “The Situation Room,” into a sober inversion of Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report,” in which Stephen Colbert’s satirical Fox-style TV blowhard interviews real-life politicians. Here the interviewer, Mr. Blitzer, was real, but the politician, Mrs. Cheney, was bogus, shamelessly making everything up and hoping her playacting would make her outrageous fictions credible. Maybe in some precincts it did.

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the “Seinfeld” election — about nothing — and 2006 often does seem like the “Colbert” election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls “truthiness.” Or perhaps the “Borat” election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert’s equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.

But there’s one important difference. When Mr. Colbert’s fake talking head provokes a real congressman into making a fool of himself or Mr. Baron Cohen’s fake reporter tries to storm the real White House’s gates, it’s a merry prank for our entertainment. By contrast, the clowns on the ballot busily falsifying reality are vying to be in charge of our real world at one of the most perilous times in our history.

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s “Sisters,” alas, still awaits.)
And always, always there’s the false reality imposed on Iraq: “Absolutely, we’re winning!” in the president’s recent formulation. After all this time, you’d think the Iraq fictions wouldn’t work anymore. The overwhelming majority of Americans now know that we were conned into this mess in the first place by two fake story lines manufactured by the White House, a connection between 9/11 and Saddam and an imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon. Both were trotted out in our last midterm campaign to rush a feckless Congress into voting for a war authorization before Election Day. As the administration pulls the same ploy four years later, this time to keep the fiasco going, you have to wonder if it can get away with lying once more.

Given the polls, I would have said no, but last week’s John Kerry farce gives me pause. Whatever lame joke or snide remark the senator was trying to impart, it was no more relevant to the reality unfolding in Iraq than the sex scenes in Jim Webb’s novels. But as the White House ingeniously inflated a molehill by a noncandidate into a mountain of fake news, real news from Iraq was often downplayed or ignored entirely. It was a chilling example of how even now a skit ginned up by the administration screenwriters can dwarf and obliterate reality in our media culture.

On the same day Mr. Kerry blundered, the United States suffered a palpable and major defeat in Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, once again doing the bidding of the anti-American leader Moktada al-Sadr, somehow coerced American forces into dismantling their cordon of Sadr City, where they were searching for a kidnapped soldier. As the melodramatic debates over how much Mr. Kerry should apologize dragged on longer, still more real news got short shrift: the October death toll for Americans in Iraq was the highest in nearly two years. Some 90 percent of the dead were enlisted men and nearly a third were on extended tours of duty or their second or third tours. Their average age was 24.

When the premises for war were being sold four years ago, you could turn to the fake news of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to find the skepticism that might poke holes in the propaganda. Four years later, the press is much chastened by its failure to do its job back then, but not all of the press. While both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert made sport of the media’s overkill on the Kerry story, their counterparts in “real” television news, especially but not exclusively on cable, flogged it incessantly. Only after The New York Times uncovered a classified Pentagon chart documenting Iraq’s rapid descent into chaos did reality begin to intrude on the contrived contretemps posed by another tone-deaf flub from a former presidential candidate not even on the ballot.

In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the Washington press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading America into the quagmire of Iraq.

Five months later, a video of Mr. Colbert’s dinner speech is still a runaway iTunes hit and his comic contempt for Washington is more popular than ever. It’s enough to give you hope that the voters may rally for reality on this crucial Election Day even as desperate politicians and some of their media enablers try one more time to stay their fictional course.

Bush and Kerry Are Right

2006-11-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

Bush was right about Kerry. What Kerry said was insulting and demeaning to our military. Of course, it was also true. The fact that the military heavily recruits to the lesser educated has been made before in "Fahrenheit 9/11", albeit more tastefully. And the recent legislation no longer requiring a HS degree or a GED makes it quite clear from where the military is expecting to get recuits. So get over it. It's true. Sad, but true.

The political machine has made it nearly impossible to say anything controversial without consequence. More than ever, our politicians have to walk on eggshells rather than provide visionary leadership. Is it any surprise that we have a bunch of politicians that all sway in line, stay the course, and don't challenge the status quo. It is too costly.

Why is Kerry on the front page? It was a joke. Tasteless and stupid, but a joke. The fact that it might have ramifications on Nov 7th is ridiculous. Bad humor should not make the front page, although I might make an exception for Dick Cheney who responded: "I guess we didn't get the nuance. He was for the joke before he was against it." Now that is pretty funny...

Gay Marriage? Not Again ...

2006-10-31T09:10:00.000-08:00

As we approach November 7th, the GOP is really grasping at straws. The list of issues they can't talk about:

- Iraq (we are no longer staying the course because we are failing)
- Afghanistan (situation turning for the worse)
- Terrorism (Bush de-classifies 3 pages of a report. Those 3 pages say we are not as safe. What did the other pages say that he didn't want to share?)
- Social Security (GOP plans went nowhere)
- Immigration (all we get out of this is a new Berlin wall)
- the Economy (stocks are high, but do poor people own any?)
- Education (still 17th in the world)

So what can we talk about? Gay marriage, again? Come on!!! Look I understand that the major religions in this country are against homosexuality. But marriage isn't strictly Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, or belonging to any one faith. You can get married by Elvis in Vegas, so don't preach to me about the sanctity of marriage.

Look if the question is whether gays should be able to share employee benefits like healthcare, why do you care so much? A friend once told me, "I don't care if a guy wants to marry a trash can." Frankly, neither do I.

Washing Dishes and the Environment

2006-10-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

After watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth I felt forever changed. What an impactful movie. But while I ALWAYS turn off the lights and AC now, and even say "Thank you, Al Gore" when I do it, not all that much has changed.

Last night I pondered why it is so easy to put the dishes in the dishwasher but so hard to put them away in the cupboard. Well, putting the dishes in is a gradual habit, one meal at a time, while you put all the clean dishes away all at once. Still it takes about the same time. Maybe it is because it is so hard to see the benefit immediately and even in the future. The dishes are either hidden in the washer or the cupboard. I need to conceptually understand the benefit to change my habits, and now.

A new group taking consumer marketing techniques to the environmentalist movement seems to agree that this is the same problem with the environmentalism movement. Here is an outline of a smarter strategy that could begin to affect our habits. A very interesting read.

Big Numbers: Bike-jacking, Car-jacking, and Taxis

2006-10-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

In a City Cycling survey from 1992, 839 respondants reported 860 bicycles stolen - more than 1 per bicyclist. Based on various numbers, this article estimates 40-45K bikes stolen each year in NYC. It's virtually an inevitability for any rider. Here is an astonishing video showing people stealing bikes two feet from commuters at rush hour, and even with police driving right by at the WTC. They used bolt cutters, an 8 minute saw job, and even a hammer. No one said a thing. Even the police.

The front page news this morning revealed that even the mayor's car isn't safe in NY. Ok, it was in Hackensack. But the interesting statistic to me is that 121,000 cars are stolen every year in NYC. Considering there are just under 2 million cars in NYC (based on 2000) that's an astonishing rate of 5.1% or almost 1 in 20 cars! Ok, Mom. I won't park the car on the street any more. I swear ...

Just in case you are wondering how many taxis there are, there are about 55,000 livery cars in NYC as of 2000.

From - Wikipedia
A "livery vehicle" remains a legalism in the U.S. for a vehicle for hire, such as a taxicab or chauffered limousine, but excluding a rented vehicle driven by the renter.

CPR Needed for the NYPD

2006-10-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

Late last week I was telling my friend to not let a single disappointment shake her faith in humanity. Now I have to practice what I preach.

Lately I have been biking to work, which has been fantastic. What a great way to wake up in the morning and get the blood pumping. But some worried, like my mom and the president of Narrowstep, Carolyn. I was on my way out of work at 8pm, when Carolyn asked me where I park the bike. And I told her:

“I park opposite the Police Station on 35th St. If someone has the balls to steal it, he deserves it.”

Well, sure enough, I walked to my bike to find it had been stolen. I talked to the building manager of my office to see if they had video and they chuckled sympathetically.

“It’s actually illegal to park your bike there. We used to cut the locks once as a warning and then confiscate them, until we realized we didn’t have to. Thieves do it for us and steal about 30 or more bikes a year.”

50 ft from a police station!!! I did file a police report (insisting its location was clearly spelled out) and outside I engaged a couple cops who were surprised and laughed. When I told them the building manager estimated 30 thefts a year, they were incredulous and mentioned how they had never seen anything. I thought that was my point. They proceeded to ridicule me, and all I could think about was the irony of the situation.

I was flooded with all the moments of police frustration: the J walking ticket, my friend’s $100 fine for riding his bike on the sidewalk right before he parked it, and an acquaintance who was fined $100 for closing his eyes at the park (it’s illegal to sleep in the park). Not surprisingly these were all at the end of the month, where cops try to fill their fine quotas. That’s not to say it’s not a hard job. But as a cop, I would be enraged by thieves right outside my precinct. Maybe the system incents the wrong behavior.

Well, instead of the NYPD “CPR” mantra of “Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect,” perhaps they should first focus on “Competence, Potency and Relevance?”

PS Thanks Arthur for the bike, and the short lived excitement of riding in the city. I may get another next spring ...

Drug Naming Gone Too Far?

2006-10-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

As a product marketer, I appreciate embedding messaging in your brand. Celebrex makes me want to celebrate. Viagra makes me feel more vital.

But have we gone too far when we have prostate medicine named FloMax?

5 bucks goes to the person who can suggest the best new drug name ... Post on the blog.

On Taking Notes

2006-10-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

Now that I am back at work at NarrowStep, the TV over the Internet company, I find myself drinking from the firehose, rapidly taking notes while learning a new industry. Here is a tip that makes my notes much more organized and productive.

If an item is particularly important or insightful, I put a star next to it.

If an item requires further research or resolution, I put a question mark next to it.

If an item requires follow-up, I put a ballot box (open square) next to it. When the item is completed, I check it off.

If I have assigned a follow-up item to someone, I put an open circle next to it (similar to the ballot box but a circle rather than a square). In the notes, I indicate who is responsible. When the item is completed, I check it off.

Now you can quickly scan your notes for important points, questions, or tasks to follow-up on. No, I can't believe I am writing on taking notes. Yes, this has made a HUGE difference in my ability to organize my thoughts and not let anything drop through the cracks. Try it. You won't go back.

Clinton Strikes Back

2006-09-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

I hope to God some of the invertebrate Democrats took notice of Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace. Could the Democrats be developing a backbone in this election season?

The question: "Why didn't the Clinton administration do more about Osama Bin Ladin?" Put on your seatbelts ...

Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBwrqcgfEXI

Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rz4OgaVABQ

You can agree or disagree, but I applaud the chutzpah!

Invasion USA?

2006-09-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

The "logic" being thrown around by the White House is astounding. In justifying the new bill on the treatment of terror subjects, the White House is hanging its straw hat on semantics. Let's not even touch how the proposal of an "annual review" of the suspect's case is a thinly veiled joke. But catch this - they are justifying the suspension of habeas corpus, one of the fundamental aspects of our legal system that prevents unfair imprisonment, on the basis that we have been invaded!! To quote Bradford Berenson, former associate White House counsel:

“There was a physical invasion of this nation on Sept. 11,’’ Mr. Berenson said.

“Is that invasion still going on?’’ asked Senator Spector.

“If there are still Al Qaeda cells at work here, it is,’’ responded Mr. Berenson.

Based on that criterion, the invasion will never end, just like the War on Terror will never end. Or the War on Drugs for that matter. There will always be terrorism, smaller groups exerting violent force using guerilla tactics because they can't prevail in open battle. Just because you call it a war, doesn't it is one.

Logically the White House is setting a precedent to throw out the Constitution - forever and whenever convenient. Over time, I think all of the creative circumnavigation by this administration will be deemed unconstitutional. From wire taps without a warrant, scanning emails without consent, to holding prisoners without trial, re-establishing precedent will take time.

In the meantime, can someone release the White House LSAT scores?

Politics: The Truth is Out There

2006-09-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

It's much easier to attack politicians with half-truths and marketing slogans than to take a meaningful stance. Summoning the memories of the John Kerry campaign immediately brings up "flip flop" in my head. Fantastic marketing, poor democracy. Where are the savvy political marketers that can move beyond the age of sleazy car salesman to a level of sophistication?

With politics being a multi-billion dollar business, where is the candidate that has a web site that explains his/her stance on every issue? Distributed video clips of such discussions that can be consumed by the news or bloggers? A blog that takes stances, defends unwarranted attacks, and explains each vote that they make in the House or Senate?

Oh, it’s right here with Hilary Clinton or Bill Frist. Well, almost.

Contrast that to Jeb Bush with literally no information. ?!? Or take a look at George Bush’s stance on the environment. So 8 years, and all you can talk about is a marine park in Hawaii? At least there is a picture with Bush and a tree. You can really sort out the BS. For fun, compare against the minority leader Harry Reid. No pictures, but a lot more than you will want to read. I need a summary. Talk about a track record.

But let’s not pick on trees and Bush’s because that is partisan and too damn easy. How about Charles Shumer? Is that 5 month old content? One NY Senator isn’t eying the presidency or reelection. Clearly a lame duck. This voting season I am ranking web sites.

With voting season here, how much research are you doing on the web? Do you just vote along party lines? What about the primaries? Do you know the candidates? Do you know the issues? Don’t be uninformed and apathetic (previous post). Spread the word!

Jesus Was a Democrat

2006-09-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Continuing on religion, politics, and hypocrisy from the last post, I wanted to add something that has bothered me for a while. What separates Christians from Jews and other religions is their belief and study of the New Testament. In a single sentence summary, I would say that the New Testament through the story of Jesus as the son of God sets forth a new paradigm of morality based on “turn the other cheek” and greater compassion and understanding compared to the Old Testament’s crueler “eye for an eye” sense of justice. This could be one-dimensional or simplistic, but if you have a better single sentence, I am all ears.

Jesus would be against the war in Iraq, the notion of nation building, and democratization through violence. He would invest heavily in diplomacy, and welcome immigrants, even illegal ones, and provide paths to citizenship. Jesus would be against torturing prisoners or deporting them to torturing states.

Jesus would be against the death penalty. Jesus consoled sinners and would be for drug counseling and against “three strikes and you're out.” Jesus helped the poor and asked the rich to repent. He would be for progressive taxation and against dividend cuts for the rich. Jesus would be for more social programs rather than less. He would pour more money into the public school system. Jesus would share his healing hands and nationalize health care. And with a penchant for turning water into wine, maybe he is a little like Ted Kennedy without the driving record.

On the other hand, Jesus would be pro life, (maybe) for a religious government, and would teach religion in schools, although not to dictate morality for the sake of condemnation. Then again, he taught openly rather than imposing his views on others.

Overall, wouldn’t Jesus be a Democrat? How is it that the Republicans have hijacked Jesus and made him a big business, death penalty loving, you’ll burn in hell slurring, war monger? Either the Christians aren’t very Christian-ly or I have the New Testament and the Old Testament really bass-ackwards.

It's Time for a Little Humility

2006-09-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

The only thing scarier than a fanatical Islamic cleric talking about jihad may be a fanatical Catholic talking about jihad. The Pope’s recent address enraged Muslims around the world leading to violence including the shooting of a nun. In quoting a medieval Catholic prince, the Pope described Islam as “evil and inhuman” in an address he described as designed as “an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue.” Well done, sir. I say, well done.

The Pope retracted some of his statements by saying he was reading a medieval text “which do not in any way express my personal thought.” Well, then why did you read it? So what you are saying is that this was an antiquated and inaccurate text as opposed to the more antiquated, but accurate Bible?

The whole affair from the initial speech to the apology stinks of hypocrisy. Any Catholic who demeaningly quotes that Muhammad “command to spread by the sword the faith he preached” has little understanding of the violent history of the Catholic Church. And the speech was “largely criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason” according to the NY Times. The Church has a long history of attacking science and reason, from imprisoning scientists for suggesting that the sun is the center of our solar system hundreds of years ago to attacking the volumes of scientific evidence for evolution today. History has shown that over time, science and reason has won most of those battles. Maybe it’s time to be using more reason than less, be more tolerant and a little more humble.

Perhaps the most interesting storyline here is that this is the first time (!?!) in recorded history that a Pope has apologized for his remarks. It is shocking to me that religious leaders are still highly regarded as infallible. They may be walking the path, but everyone has missteps.

The primary dimension by which I regard and respect organized religions is by their tolerance of other beliefs, in essence their own humility. I respect Buddhism and generic notions of personal spirituality and have gradually more objections as you approach Catholicism and then Islam.

Why is it so hard to understand that as long as you call the other person an infidel, an evil doer, or tell them they are going to hell, you are building barriers, not bridges. You are creating wars, not building peace. You are causing suffering.

Well, if the Pope can finally apologize for his remarks, maybe it’s time for us all to admit that we could be wrong. And by us, of course, I mean you. Just kidding.